Civil War History

Elaine Parsons enters the fray of sesquicentennial reassessments of Reconstruction with a well-researched account on one of the period's greatest villains—the Ku Klux Klan. Her work compliments other recent publications, but she pushes the scholarship of race and postwar violence in another direction. She offers a comprehensive revision of Allen W. Trelease's seminal work by focusing on the real people who meted out suffering as well as the more abstract "Ku-Klux" label that various individuals employed for their own purposes. She contends that the "two Klans were utterly entangled with one another: representations of the Ku-Klux had a separate though dependent relationship to the thing itself" (10).

Parsons makes four important claims over seven chapters. First, white northerners shaped what the Klan became, both real and discursively. Second, the Klan functioned as a modernization project in which rural southerners learned from their urban northern counterparts. Third, the Klan facilitated sectional reconciliation and black exclusion. Fourth, the "Ku-Klux" label served as a new identity, which white men embraced irrespective of region, while simultaneously curtailing black emancipation. Her methodology, especially a lens of suspicion and skepticism, allows her discernment of the Klan as a self-interested response to Reconstruction rather than a widespread centralized organization. Moreover, it lets her neither sugarcoat the violence inflicted on communities nor place blame solely on the actions of a few southerners. Urban white northerners, congressional leaders, the national media, popular entertainment, and even black leaders are implicated. In essence, "Ku-Klux" [End Page 202] was a powerful label created by white men for the promotion of local, regional, and national interests of race, citizenship, and the postwar state.

Overall, Parsons is successful. She deftly presents a clear narrative that challenges historical understandings of the Ku Klux Klan while carefully handling difficult source material of the real effects of the violence on individuals and communities in the opening chapters. Therein, she situates the Klan's origins to a group of middling-class men who sought to establish their postwar lives mirroring northern urban modernity in a social fraternal club. Modernity shaped the creation of a Ku-Klux identity based on performance and ritual, including costumes, meetings, and instances of racial violence. However, the Klan "hardly made ripple in even local public consciousness" (53). As violence attributed to the Klan intensified between 1868 and mid-1871, modernity and performance shaped the meaning over the violence on victims' bodies and helped to redefine postwar notions of southern manhood as white, secular, and media-savvy. Despite active resistance against Ku-Klux representations, concepts of black manhood could never overcome these new antimodern tropes.

Moreover, Parsons's extensive analysis of four major newspapers highlights that the Klan and the "Ku-Klux" label could never have grown or evolved without the national media. She identifies four themes within the coverage that advanced Klan notoriety and provided readers with a shared language to understand postwar America. Ultimately, the coverage served to normalize the Klan by portraying the federal government as oppressing the people. In chapter 4, Parsons notes the active role of skeptics and other individuals who denied the existence and effects of the Klan. Here, she ably uses popular entertainment, the varied nature of the media coverage, and general conspiratorial anxieties of an overreaching federal government in explaining how these individuals maintained the Klan as being grounded in the imaginations of black southerners and their Republican allies.

In the concluding chapters, Parsons reframes the Klan and racial violence in Union County, an upland South Carolinian community. Using historical network analysis and other interdisciplinary tools, Parsons reveals that the violence resulted from a subculture embraced by white and black residents and a collaboration of white residents in eliminating the threat posed by black leaders. A raid on a jail and subsequent mass executions drew media attention to community and a massive dislocation of black residents. More importantly, the...