In The Scalawags, James Alex Baggett ambitiously uncovers the genesis of scalawag leaders throughout the former Confederacy. Using a collective biography approach, Baggett profiles 742 white southerners who supported Congressional Reconstruction and the Republican Party. He then compares and contrasts the scalawags with 666 redeemer-Democrats who opposed and eventually replaced them. Significantly, he analyzes this rich data by region -- the Upper South, the Southeast, and the Southwest -- as well as for the South as a whole. Baggett follows the life of each scalawag before, during, and after the war, revealing real personalities and not mere statistics. Examining such features as birthplace, vocation, estate, slaveholding status, education, political antecedents and experience, stand on secession, war record, and postwar political activities, he finds striking uniformity among scalawags. This is the first Southwide study of the scalawags, its scope and astounding wealth in quantity and quality of sources make it the definitive work on the subject.

The first history of the efforts and fates of white Republicans during Reconstruction South Carolina Scalawags tells the familiar story of Reconstruction from a mostly unfamiliar vantage point, that of white southerners who broke ranks and supported the newly recognized rights and freedoms of their black neighbors. The end of the Civil War turned South Carolina's political hierarchy upside down by calling into existence what had not existed before, a South Carolina Republican Party, and putting its members at the helm of state government from 1868 to 1876. Composed primarily of former slaves, the burgeoning party also attracted the membership of newly arrived northern "carpetbaggers" and of white South Carolinians who had lived in the state prior to secession. Known as "scalawags," these South Carolinians numbered as many as ten thousand—fifteen percent of the state's white population—but have remained a maligned and largely misunderstood component of post-Civil War politics. In this first book-length exploration of their egalitarian objectives and short-lived ambitions, Hyman Rubin III resurrects the lives and careers of these individuals who took a leading role during Reconstruction. South Carolina Scalawags delves into the lives of representative white Republicans, exploring their backgrounds, political attitudes and actions, and post-Reconstruction fates. The Republicans succeeded in creating a much more representative and responsive government than the state had seen before or would see for generations. During its heyday the party began to attract wealthier white citizens, many of whom were moderates favoring cooperation between open-minded Democrats and responsible Republicans. In assessing the eventual Republican collapse, Rubin does not gloss over disturbing trends toward factionalism and corruption that increasingly characterized the party's governance. Rather he points to these failings in explaining the federal government's abandonment of the party in 1876 and the Democrats' reassertion of white supremacy.

After the Civil War, Congress required ten former Confederate states to rewrite their constitutions before they could be readmitted to the Union. An electorate composed of newly enfranchised former slaves, native southern whites (minus significant numbers of disenfranchised former Confederate officials), and a small contingent of "carpetbaggers," or outside whites, sent delegates to ten constitutional conventions. Derogatorily labeled "black and tan" by their detractors, these assemblies wrote constitutions and submitted them to Congress and to the voters in their respective states for approval. Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags offers a quantitative study of these decisive but little-understood assemblies -- the first elected bodies in the United States to include a significant number of blacks. Richard L. Hume and Jerry B. Gough scoured manuscript census returns to determine the age, occupation, property holdings, literacy, and slaveholdings of 839 of the conventions' 1,018 delegates. Carefully analyzing convention voting records on certain issues -- including race, suffrage, and government structure -- they correlate delegates' voting patterns with their racial and socioeconomic status. The authors then assign a "Republican support score" to each delegate who voted often enough to count, establishing the degree to which each delegate adhered to the Republican leaders' program at his convention. Using these scores, they divide the delegates into three groups -- radicals, swing voters, and conservatives -- and incorporate their quantitative findings into the narrative histories of each convention, providing, for the first time, a detailed analysis of these long-overlooked assemblies. Hume and Gough's comprehensive study offers an objective look at the accomplishments and shortcomings of the conventions and humanizes the delegates who have until now been understood largely as stereotypes. Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags provides an essential reference guide for anyone seeking a better understanding of the Reconstruction era.

"The history of Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis is told through the stories of those who are buried there. Cemetery records and interviews with insiders inform the research"--Provided by publisher.

The Scallywags are a bunch of messy, noisy wolves who find it rather hard to behave properly. But as they soon discover, if it means losing your friends, then just maybe it's time to practise those manners... By the bestselling creator of the Hugless Douglas series, which has sold over 1.4 million copies in 26 languages. Find out more about David Melling at http://www.davidmelling.co.uk/ Check out the sequel - The Scallywags Blow Their Top - in which the rambunctious wolves learn to control their tempers. 'David Melling's touch is light but this is a thought-provoking and refreshing storyline.' - Guardian

Scalawag tells the surprising story of a white working-class boy who became an unlikely civil rights activist. Born in 1935 in Richmond, where he was sent to segregated churches and schools, Ed Peeples was taught the ethos and lore of white supremacy by every adult in his young life. That message came with an equally cruel one—that, as the child of a wage-earning single mother, he was destined for failure. But by age nineteen Peeples became what the whites in his world called a "traitor to the race." Pushed by a lone teacher to think critically, Peeples found his way to the black freedom struggle and began a long life of activism. He challenged racism in his U.S. Navy unit and engaged in sit-ins and community organizing. Later, as a university professor, he agitated for good jobs, health care, and decent housing for all, pushed for the creation of African American studies courses at his university, and worked toward equal treatment for women, prison reform, and more. Peeples did most of his human rights work in his native Virginia, and his story reveals how institutional racism pervaded the Upper South as much as the Deep South. Covering fifty years' participation in the long civil rights movement, Peeples’s gripping story brings to life an unsung activist culture to which countless forgotten individuals contributed, over time expanding their commitment from civil rights to other causes. This engrossing, witty tale of escape from what once seemed certain fate invites readers to reflect on how moral courage can transform a life.

Florida has been the home of many unusual characters throughout the years. Meet Ned Buntline, Laura Riding, Wilson Mizner, Sam Jones, and many others. Storytellers, lawbreakers, movers and shakers, sportsmen, moviemakers, visionaries, and mobsters all left their mark on Florida. Next in series > > See all of the books in this series

A controversial period in American history as revealed through one man's personal and political experiences

From the late nineteenth century until World War I, a group of Columbia University students gathered under the mentorship of the renowned historian William Archibald Dunning (1857--1922). Known as the Dunning School, these students wrote the first generation of state studies on the Reconstruction -- volumes that generally sympathized with white southerners, interpreted radical Reconstruction as a mean-spirited usurpation of federal power, and cast the Republican Party as a coalition of carpetbaggers, freedmen, scalawags, and former Unionists. Edited by the award-winning historian John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, The Dunning School focuses on this controversial group of historians and its scholarly output. Despite their methodological limitations and racial bias, the Dunning historians' writings prefigured the sources and questions that later historians of the Reconstruction would utilize and address. Many of their pioneering dissertations remain important to ongoing debates on the broad meaning of the Civil War and Reconstruction and the evolution of American historical scholarship. This groundbreaking collection of original essays offers a fair and critical assessment of the Dunning School that focuses on the group's purpose, the strengths and weaknesses of its constituents, and its legacy. Squaring the past with the present, this important book also explores the evolution of historical interpretations over time and illuminates the ways in which contemporary political, racial, and social questions shape historical analyses.