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Review
| Carnival of Blood: Dueling, Lynching, and Murder in South Carolina, 1880–1920, by John Hammond Moore. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. 203 pages. $29.95, cloth.
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| Moore's Carnival of Blood attempts to shed new light on the postbellum and Progressive eras and to place violence in South Carolina within a larger historiographical discussion of southern violence. An introduction discusses the theories and descriptions of Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Edward L. Ayers, and W.J. Cash, but. Moore's findings do not fit the descriptions and theories of these historians for various reasons. Although some violence was motivated by a defense of honor, most southern families could not afford the possible loss of the head of a household to defend an antiquated sense of honor. Likewise Ayers's suggestion that although geographically examining southern sub-regions represents the best way to explain patterns of lynching, it does not fit South Carolina where lynching cut across all geographic regions. Nor can South Carolina violence be explained by Cash's (The Mind of the South) ideas about emotional individualism as a dominant cultural trait of Southern men. Rather, Moore finds the explanations of Sheldon Hackney and Ben Robertson (Red Hills and Cotton) closer to the mark. For Hackney, southern violence tended to be the product of an intense localism, or "siege mentality" that fiercely resisted the threat of what was seen as alien or foreign. Robertson's memoir indicates that violence was not so much premeditated as a part of the natural landscape: where "We shoot on the spur of the moment.... it clears the air like a thunderstorm" (p. 9). To these observations, Moore adds his own conclusion: Violence in South Carolina occurred with greater frequency in those areas of the state where local institutional structures (courts, jails, law enforcement forces) were least developed. Most violence took place in newly-formed counties where average citizens had no confidence in traditional law enforcement, and matters were made worse by a state government that did not act assertively enough to clamp down on miscarriages of justice. When state government finally acted decisively to curb this violence, it was motivated by the emigration of much of its African American labor force and a declining image in the national press. |
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Teachers wishing to discuss dueling and episodic murders might consider using one of the chapters from this book, although W. Fitzhugh Brundage's, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 covers the period more systematically and with a better-developed analytical framework that focuses attention on the causes and dynamics of mob violence in particular contexts. Teachers of South Carolina history will find Carnival of Blood more useful. The weakness of Carnival of Blood is that it relies almost exclusively on Bourbon sources, fails to consult African American sources for social history, and, with a few exceptions, does not provide a "thick description" of enough particular cases beyond famous duels and notorious murders. His discussion of lynching shows only a cursory reading of the Congressional KKK Reports or the WPA ex-slave narratives, both of which provide valuable insight into the social origins of violence. Moreover, he does not seriously engage Brundage's work and completely fails to engage the work of Thomas Holt and Joel Williamson that provides ample context for the evolution of racial attitudes in South Carolina and beyond during this time period. The packaging of the book seems to be aimed more at readers of "true crime" than at consumers of balanced history. |
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| Holy Innocents' Episcopal School, Atlanta |
Paul Horton |
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