An anthology of important scholarship on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras from the journal Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association. Since 1931, the South Carolina Historical Association has published an annual, peer-reviewed journal of historical scholarship. In this volume, past SCHA officers of Michael Brem Bonner and Fritz Hamer present twenty-three of the most enduring and significant essays from the archives, offering a treasure trove of scholarship on an impressive variety of subjects including race, politics, military events, and social issues. All articles published in the Proceedings after 2002 are available on the SCHA website, but this volume offers, for the first time, easy access to the journal’s best articles on the Civil War and Reconstruction up through 2001. Preeminent scholars such as Frank Vandiver, Dan T. Carter, and Orville Vernon Burton are among the contributors to this collection, an essential resource for historical synthesis of the Palmetto State’s experience during that era.

The Reconstruction was meant to be a time of rebuilding and healing for the South following the Civil War. But the Reconstruction, marked by the continued strong hatred and hostility between liberated African Americans and angry Ku Klux Klan members, was hardly a time of reconciliation for the South. This work deals with the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, a paramilitary group with political aims that used violence and intimidation to achieve its goals. It addresses exclusively the Klans activities in York County, South Carolina, during the years 1865-1877. It clarifies some misconceptions about the Reconstruction Klan and disentangles it from later organizations that used the same name. There are no reports of its burning crosses or persecuting Jews and Catholics and it has no connection to the Klan that appeared in the early part of the twentieth century or todays counterpart that marches under the Confederate flag. Throughout the Reconstruction, blacks and whites tried to out-shout each other in the new era of conversation, and, as shown in this work, made little progress in understanding, or trying to understand, each other.

A chronicle of postwar resistance in the Palmetto State State of Rebellion recounts the volatile course of Reconstruction in the state that experienced the longest, largest, and most dynamic federal presence in the years immediately following the Civil War. Richard Zuczek examines the opposition of conservative white South Carolinians to the Republican-led program and the federal and state governments' attempts to quell such resistance. Contending that the issues that had driven secession—the relationship of the states to the federal government and the status of African Americans—remained unresolved even after Northern victory, Zuczek describes the period from 1865 to 1877 as a continuation of the struggle that began in 1861. He argues that Republican efforts failed primarily because of an organized, coherent effort by white Southerners committed to white supremacy. Zuczek details the tactics—from judicial and political fraud to economic coercion, terrorism, and guerrilla activity—employed by conservatives to nullify the African American vote, control African American labor, and oust northern Republicans from the state. He documents the federal government's attempt to quash the conservative challenge but shows that, by 1876, white opposition was so unified, widespread, and well armed that it passed beyond government control.

In South Carolina, in the aftermath of the Civil War, a group of ex-slaves joined the Democratic "Red Shirts," white paramilitary clubs dedicated to restoring antebellum values. Drawing on primary sources, Drago examines the relationship between black initiative and southern paternalism.

This book examines social, political, and cultural conflicts opened by the abolition of slavery and the fashioning of wage relations in the era of the American Civil War. It offers a new, close look at the origins, goals, and tactics of popular political clubs created by emancipated workers in the countryside of one of the Deep South's oldest plantation states. The Work of Reconstruction draws on a rich documentary record that allowed ex-slaves to express in their own words and behavior the aspirations and goals that underlay their efforts. Not satisfied to render freed men and women as objects of theoretical inquiry, this book vividly recovers the concrete practices and language in which ex-slaves achieved freedom and the expectations that they had of liberty.

This extensive guide details the political and economic forces that affected the expansion of slavery and how slaves, freed black Americans, and white liberal politicians fought for the freedom of slaves and for the basic rights of dignity and protection that they had not previously enjoyed under the law. The book sheds light on the collective and sometimes little-known contributions of African Americans to their own freedom and traces the economic disparity between the freed slaves and the rest of America, the rise of terrorism targeting African Americans, and the politics that eventually led to the Jim Crow era.