Book Review

The political history of the South has profited lately from what certain subjects of Laura Edwards's study of Reconstruction-era North Carolina would undoubtedly term scholarly miscegenation. Building on the work of such social and political cum legal historians as Amy Dru Stanley, Michael Grossberg, and Peter Bardaglio, in Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction Edwards places the telling social detail of a local study within the broader political and ideological context provided by consideration of landmark cases and trends in the law. To this she adds the insight of feminist critiques of liberal political theory and the new vistas of southern politics gained by employing gender as a category of historical analysis. The result, as signaled by the framing of her book on each end with the trial and execution of a black man for the rape or attempted rape of a white woman, is a bold departure from traditional narratives of southern political history.	1
There is something for everyone in this book, from discussion of the reluctant embrace of the free labor ideology by southern planters to analysis of the advice of a postwar predecessor to Martha Stewart. Tying these disparate strands together is a concern with the political repercussions of the reconstruction of southern households after emancipation. Explaining that "emancipation ... remade southern households as thoroughly as it did the region's political institutions" (6), Edwards zeroes in on marriage as the foundation of freedom, the core from which radiated outward all other civil rights. Understood as the basis of society as well as its reproductive unit, marriage in the nineteenth century served as a crucial boundary marker of the intersection between the private world of the household and the public world of the state, with the husband and father serving as intermediary. It was through this interrelated role of husband and father that matrimony established a clear relationship between sexual self-determination and civic power.	2
The elite white architects of North Carolina's postwar Black Code saw marriage as a relationship of obligation. Black North Carolinians, on the other hand, defined legal marriage in terms of rights, viewing it as "not only a civil right but also the entering wedge into a broad range of social privileges" (37). Drawing on a wealth of court and Freedmen's Bureau records, Edwards investigates the consequences of this disjunction between white and black visions of marriage as it played out in contests over the dominion of wives and children and relationships between wage workers and employers. In a nuanced argument that pairs a discussion of domestic violence with apprenticeship laws, Edwards shows how the North Carolina Supreme Court's affirmation of domestic government and hierarchy legitimized African-American demands for parental rights. When local courts used apprenticeship laws to solve the labor problems of white planters, black parents flooded the Freedmen's Bureau with complaints and took local whites to court. Capitalizing on their status as legal heads of household, former slaves asserted the right to protect (and exploit) their children and extended kin.	3
A good deal of this book is spent outlining competing class-based models of household governance and gender construction. While it may seem a diversion, in fact an understanding of the connection between family hierarchies and definitions of "true" manhood and womanhood helps make sense of the political behavior of men in the Reconstruction South. Common whites and African Americans rejected bourgeois standards of both manhood and womanhood and domesticity. But they did not reject the concepts of gender hierarchy and difference that underlay elite norms. This embrace of patriarchy came with a high price for black and white men as well as for women, as Edwards shows in her final chapter on the collapse of biracial political alliance in North Carolina.	4
In the late 1880s the Knights of Labor united common whites and blacks in a campaign focused on issues of public services and state regulation. Like the Republicans before them, the Knights crafted a race-neutral definition of manhood to insist on the equal right of all adult men to political participation. The Democrats responded in two ways. First, they defined manhood in race and class terms, around the ideal of the "best man." Invariably white and propertied, the "best man" ideology allowed Democrats to label nearly all black men and many whites "unmanly" and thus unfit for political power. Second, and more tantalizingly, Democrats attacked the racial identity of white men who allied politically with African Americans. Democratic cartoonists depicted white men who allied politically with blacks as "albinoes" and "white negroe[s]" (188). Defining the "best men" along race and class lines, Democrats marginalized most of the Knights' constituency and declared them threats to white supremacy and social order.	5
Arguing powerfully from a base of evidence centered on a single county (Granville), Edwards is interested more in signification than quantification. Like most cultural historians, she is vulnerable to the charge of selective use of evidence. This fact does not detract, however, from the force or persuasiveness of her argument. Gendered Strife and Confusion documents beyond doubt that contemporaries during Reconstruction were aware of the interconnections between race and gender, on the one hand, and civil and political power on the other. Anchoring political rights squarely in the household economy, Edwards reveals the power relationships so often obscured by a narrow focus on high political history. Finally, by unsentimentally telling the stories of common white and black men and women, Edwards restores importance to the agents, black and white, whose actions were informed by but also informed white supremacist discourses of racial hierarchy and intolerance.	6
Jane Dailey Rice University

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