Results by title

A revealing biography of a powerful Southern editor at the center of South Carolina’s post‑Reconstruction political transformation.

In the decades following the Civil War, South Carolina—like much of the South—struggled to redefine its political identity amid the collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of conservative “Redeemer” governments. In Francis Warrington Dawson and the Politics of Restoration, historian E. Culpepper Clark offers a deeply researched and incisive study of this transformation through the life and work of Francis Warrington Dawson, one of the state’s most influential newspaper editors.

Dawson was far more than a chronicler of events. As a powerful voice in South Carolina’s political press, he helped shape public opinion, broker alliances among conservative factions, and articulate the ideological foundations of post‑Reconstruction governance. Clark situates Dawson at the center of the struggles among Redeemers, Straight‑Out Democrats, agrarian reformers, and emerging political leaders such as Ben Tillman, revealing a political landscape marked by rivalry, class conflict, and competing visions of the New South.

Drawing on extensive manuscript collections, newspapers, and political correspondence, Clark explores the close relationship between journalism and power in the late nineteenth century and demonstrates how newspapers functioned as active political actors rather than neutral observers. The result is both a compelling political biography and a broader analysis of how restoration politics operated at the state level.

Francis Warrington Dawson and the Politics of Restoration is an essential work for readers interested in Southern history, Reconstruction and its aftermath, the history of American journalism, and the forces that shaped the political culture of the modern South.

In From Slave to State Legislator, David A. Joens traces Thomas’s trajectory from a slave owned by a doctor’s family in Alabama to a prominent attorney believed to be the wealthiest African American man in Chicago at the time of his death in 1899. Providing one of the few comprehensive looks at African Americans in Chicago during this period, Joens reveals how Thomas’s career represents both the opportunities available to African Americans in the postwar period and the limits still placed on them. When Thomas moved to Chicago in 1869, he started a grocery store, invested in real estate, and founded the first private school for African Americans before becoming involved in politics.

From Slave to State Legislator provides detailed coverage of Thomas’s three terms in the legislature during the 1870s and 1880s, his multiple failures to be nominated for reelection, and his loyalty to the Republican Party at great political cost, calling attention to the political differences within a Black community often considered small and homogenous. Even after achieving his legislative legacy—the passage of the first state civil rights law—Thomas was plagued by patronage issues and an increasingly bitter split with the African American community frustrated with slow progress toward true equality. Drawing on newspapers and an array of government documents, Joens provides the most thorough review to date of the first civil rights legislation and the two controversial “colored conventions” chaired by Thomas.

Joens cements Thomas’s legacy as a committed and conscientious lawmaker amid political and personal struggles. In revealing the complicated rivalries and competing ambitions that shaped Black northern politics during the Reconstruction Era, Joens shows the long-term impact of Thomas’s friendship with other burgeoning African American political stars and his work to get more black representatives elected. The volume is enhanced by short biographies of other key Chicago African American politicians of the era.