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Reconstruction

What My History Books Left Out

January 4, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

In early November, we visited friends and family in the New Orleans area. On a sunny Sunday afternoon, we found ourselves with some of our oldest friends wandering the French Quarter. For a break, we stopped at the small café operated by the Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum that is all about the history of the city. In the shop (all museums everywhere have shops), our friend pointed me toward a book called Afro-Creole Poetry by Clint Bruce.

The work is a collection of 79 poems that were published between 1862 and 1870 in two newspapers in New Orleans – L’Union and La Tribune Nouvelle-Orleans. As the names employ, they were published in French: La Tribune also had an English edition. L’Union began publication a few months after the city fell to the ships of Union Admiral David Farragut. The paper lasted about two years, and it was almost immediately replaced by La Tribune.

Louis Charles Roudanez, a founder of both newspapers

Many newspapers published poetry in the 19th century; a few continued doing that in the early years of the 20th century before the practice died out. These two French newspapers were unusual and unique for the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. They were owned, operated, and almost entirely written by Blacks. Specifically, the newspapers were owned and written by Free Blacks.

Clint Bruce, who assembled this collection of Afro-Creole poetry (with the poems displayed in both French and English), provides considerable background about the publishers and writers. They came from an elite class of Blacks in the city. Many of the families had been there for generations; many came as refuges of the revolution in Haiti or from French-speaking families expelled from Cuba by the Spanish governor after Napoleon invaded Spain in Europe. While vastly outnumbered by enslaved Blacks in Louisiana, their small numbers belied their influence. When the Union occupied the city in 1862, this group of Free Blacks rose to almost immediate prominence, and their members played a significant role in Reconstruction in both the city and the state.

Before I read Afro-Creole Poetry, I was largely ignorant of any of this. I was born and raised in New Orleans. I took a year of required state history in middle school. We studied the Civil War and Reconstruction in high school and college. I attended LSU, which had at the time some of the top Civil War historians in the country. My junior year in college, I took a semester of Louisiana history. What I came out of all that with was a very different picture of Reconstruction in Louisiana and almost complete ignorance of Free Blacks.

I tend to look suspiciously at, and discount, efforts to rewrite American history to suit current political narratives. There’s a lot of that going on. But I have to ask myself why this group pf people, and all they accomplished, had disappeared from the history I studied in school. The answer I’ve come up with, mostly through other reading, is that Civil War historians for a long time focused on the major players, like Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson, Davis, and generals on both sides, and on a barebones account of Reconstruction that focused primarily on how it ended with the election of 1876 and the deal cut to make Rutherford Hayes the president. I think this is less a case of “systemic racism” and more a case of “this is how history was studied and understood.” What I never knew was that Reconstruction didn’t begin in 1865 with the defeat of the Confederacy, but in 1862 with the capture of my hometown.

Yesterday, I posted a review at Tweetspeak Poetry of Afro-Creole Poetry that focuses on the poems with a little of the background. But the book and what it represents needed a larger interpretation, a larger understanding. And it’s a reminder to me not to be so quick to judge all reinterpretations of historical events, especially those that are particularly close to home.

“Reconstruction in Mississippi” by James Wilford Garner

December 5, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

James Wilford Garner (1871-1938) was born and raised in Pike County, Mississippi, the same county where my paternal great-grandparents were born and raised (during the Reconstruction period, the state legislature split the county into two, with the southern half retaining the name and the north half being renamed Lincoln County). Garner graduated from the Mississippi Agricultural & Mechanical College in 1892 and went on to study at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. 

Garner would become a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Illinois, and he also did extensive teaching work in India. He co-authored a history of the United States with Henry Cabot Lodge, and he published a number of other works on government and political science.

The work he is best known for is his Ph.D. thesis, published in 1901 under the title of Reconstruction in Mississippi. It firmly established him as what was then called the Dunning School, named for Columbia professor William Archibald Dunning. The school of thought generally favored a conservative, more pro-Southern understanding of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. 

The thinking of the Dunning School was influential in universities through World War II, although it was not without its critics, notably historian and civil rights activist W.E. B. DuBois. However, DuBois did consider that, of all the writings associated with the Dunning School, Garner’s Reconstruction in Mississippi was the fairest.

Reading it today, 120 years after it was published, is to see it as a product of its time. Yet Garner did marshal a huge amount of data to support his thesis that Reconstruction, managed by Radical Republicans and backed by the U.S. Army, was largely a disaster for the state of Mississippi. 

The work begins with a summary of secession and the Civil War and the transition from war to reconstruction. It covers presidential reconstruction under Andrew Johnson, followed by congressional reconstruction. The period of congressional reconstruction was particularly marked by rampant theft and corruption in the state government, involving Northerners called carpetbaggers and Southerners know as scalawags who seemed determined to raid the state of as many resources as possible. Garner notes that many of the Union soldiers who had fought in Mississippi returned after the war to live there. (He also notes than roughly one fifth of private property in the state changed ownership during the period.) 

James Wilford Garner

It was a difficult time for many in the state. Not only was Mississippi economically devastated by the war, rail lines had to be rebuilt, the postal service reestablished, social order restored, and a civil government created that could function. Garner also devotes entire chapters to the creation and functioning of the Freedman’s Bureau, the disturbances associated with the Ku Klux Klan, and the creation (or re-creation) of the public school system, which was also plagued by corruption. 

Reconstruction in Mississippi has a definite pro-Southern tilt to its depiction of Reconstruction, but I understand why DuBois considered it relatively fair. Garner is evenhanded in his criticisms, and he does discuss the period broadly and rather inclusively. He doesn’t paint the period of slavery as some happy, pleasant time for all concerned. But it’s his extensive use of data, tables, and charts that is most impressive. 

Top illustration: A Drawing of a Freedman’s School in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1866.

“War and Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1861-1875” by Charles Mills

September 12, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

During the Great Depression in the 1930s, the U.S. government’s Works Projects Administration undertook a number of efforts to help the unemployed retain their skills. While critics saw it as creating a huge army loyal to President Roosevelt, the WPA did employ some 8.5 million people in a wide variety of areas. 

One of those efforts was the Writers’ Project, which, among other projects, produced travel guides to cities and states across the United States. Writers also collected oral histories of still-living Americans who had experienced extraordinary events, like the Civil War.

War and Reconstruction in Mississippi 1861-1875 was one such work. It focused on the town of Holly Springs in Marshall County, in the northern part of the state. Holly Springs was noteworthy for a number of reasons, not least of which was that it had changed hands 57 times during the Civil War. Before the war, it had been a prosperous town in a planter- and slave-based economy. During the Reconstruction period, it was occupied by a federal garrison and experienced Republican political control. 

The WPA document assembled a history of the town and its founding, its experiences during the war as recounted by still living inhabitants, the role of Freedman’s Bureau during Reconstruction, and how the former Confederates eventually regained political control by stuffing the ballot box for the Democrats. 

The document was edited and republished by Charles Mills in 2010. While some 60 to 70 years intervened between the events and how people remembered them, it still remains a valuable resource for what people on all sides experienced during the war and what followed.

Charles Mills

Mills is also the author of Gold, Murder and Monsters in the Superstition Mountains, Legends of the Superstition Mountains, Death and Delusion in the Superstition Mountains, Treasure Legends of the Civil War, Love, Sex and Marriage in the Civil War, Civil War Civilian Life: Manassas, Virginia (Battle of Bull Run), and several other works on historical subjects. He is the producer and co-host of Virginia Time Travel, a TV program seen by two million viewers in northern Virginia, which is also where he lives (on land once owned by George Washington). 

Top photograph: The New York Herald of Nov. 7, 1862, describing the expected move of Gen. Grant’s army southward toward Holly Springs. 

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Meet the Man

An award-winning speechwriter and communications professional, Glynn Young is the author of three novels and the non-fiction book Poetry at Work.

 

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