Bruce E. Baker

Lynch Law Reversed: The Rape of Lula Sherman, the Lynching of Manse Waldrop, and the Debate Over Lynching in the 1880s

This study examines an 1887 lynching in Pickens County, South Carolina, in which a black mob lynched a white man for the rape and murder of a black girl. Two members of the mob, both African American, were eventually convicted, but a massive petition campaign led the Governor to pardon them. The study relies largely on coroner’s inquests for the murder victim and the lynching victim, court records, and newspaper articles. It suggests that the anomalous nature of this lynching prompted many people to consider and debate exactly what justified lynching and what role race was to play in those justifications. Since the lynching occurred at the very point when lynching victims were becoming overwhelmingly African American men, the insights provided into contemporary views on lynching are all the more valuable.

“The First Anarchist That Ever Came to Atlanta”: Hiram F. Hover from New York to the New South

When Hiram F. Hover walked out of jail onto Watauga Street in Hickory, North Carolina, near the end of 1889, he must have known that he was leaving behind the work that had consumed him over the past four years, ever since he arrived in Knoxville in late 1885. This passion had cost him his wife, his friends, his right eye, and nearly his life. Hover had come to the South amid the tumult of the 1880s, and the South brought to the surface ideas for which he had long found little use. With these ideas, acquired during his childhood in New York’s Hudson River Valley, Hover tried to change the South to stem forces that were turning landholding farmers into tenants and pushing them into the brick mills sprouting up out of the Piedmont soil. Hover’s plans inspired hundreds of workers in the Carolinas and Georgia, but they also inspired armed opposition from white landlords and employers. The changes Hover tried, and failed, to bring to the South provide an important link between two better-known periods of radicalism in the South—Reconstruction and Populism—and they also help us rethink the role of indigenous and outside sources of radical thought in the late-nineteenth-century South.1

Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause

the same view that Lincoln took of his constitutional powers and duties,” McGinty points out (p. 9). Overall, Lincoln and the Court offers a solid survey of the Lincoln administration’s relationship with the nation’s highest legal tribunal, taking into account not only the constitutional issues swirling around the court during the Civil War, but also the personalities of the individuals involved in negotiating those troubled waters. They “were not cogs in an impersonal machine but people,” McGinty observes, who were “buffeted by the exigencies of the time, attempting to live up to their judicial oaths, sometimes failing but mostly succeeding” (p. 10). This observation holds true not only for the Supreme Court’s justices, but also Lincoln himself.

Hunting and Fishing in the New South: Black Labor and White Leisure after the Civil War

at Appomattox. A broader chronological framing might have offered greater interpretive purchase. For all this, the comprehensiveness and clarity of Jones’s account mean that it will surely become the standard text on Union and Confederate relations with Great Britain and France for many years to come. It offers a compelling argument for viewing the conflict in its international context and rightly emphasizes the mutual misapprehensions that so plagued Anglo-American and French-American relations during the American Civil War.