A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction

A Man of Bad Reputation opens with John G. Lea’s confession that he had assassinated North Carolina State Senator John Walter Stephens in 1870. Lea gave his confession in 1919, nearly half a century after the murder. Stephens’s death, Drew A. Swanson contends, had profound repercussions. On the one hand, it “featured prominently in the US Congress’s investigation of Klan activities in the South,” which eventually led for the Enforcements Acts and the end of the first Ku Klux Klan. On the other hand, it sparked the Kirk-Holden War, which led to the impeachment of Governor William Woods Holden, his removal from office, the death of Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow in North Carolina, “a new and even more effective form of white supremacy that used ‘soft’ terrorism in place of the Klan’s overt violence.” Swanson, currently Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Distinguished Professor of Southern History at Georgia State University, offers a fascinating discussion of the life and death of Stephens, which also becomes a story about the North Carolina Piedmont, Reconstruction in North Carolina, and the ways in which people have remembered and misremembered this important period.