A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction by Drew A. Swanson (review)

Reviewed by: A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction by Drew A. Swanson Madeleine Forrest (bio) A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction. By Drew A. Swanson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 220. Cloth, 99. 00; paper, 24. 95. ) Long a tool of Civil War historians, local histories have been used to better understand the ways in which everyday life in the nineteenth century was affected by war and its aftermath. Writing this type of history requires the historian to be adept at understanding all facets of American life—religion, social mores, the military, politics, economics, education— at both the local and national level. Needless to say, these histories can be a challenge to write. Their importance is clear, though, as illustrated in Drew Swanson's A Man of Bad Reputation. Examining the 1870 murder of state senator John Stephens in Caswell County, North Carolina, Swanson expands beyond the bounds of a more traditional local history and argues that Stephens's life, death, and memory "serve as a window into the nation's Reconstruction experience" (6). Rather than examining the ways that national Reconstruction events affected Caswell County, he uses events in the broader Piedmont area of North Carolina to better understand why the Radical Republicans' Reconstruction failed; he shows how the death of one man was the "hinge" from which the promise of democratic policies in the postwar era transitioned to the political backlash and violence of the Redemption period in 1870s North Carolina and across the former Confederacy (3). The book is organized into six chapters, and Swanson begins with the early days of Reconstruction in North Carolina and the events surrounding John Stephens's death. After the Civil War, Stephens, who came from a poor family, rose quickly through the political ranks as he became a loyal supporter of antiwar governor, and new Republican, William Holden, another native son of the Piedmont region. Holden and Stephens were reelected and elected, respectively, in the 1868 elections that saw the new state constitution ratified. Like Holden, Stephens was a member of the Republican Party, and he had worked previously for the Freedman's Bureau, another mark against him by conservatives in Caswell County. A prominent member of the local Union League, he also acted as a sort of "secret detective" for the governor, keeping Holden abreast of conservative actions within the area as well as the role of the increasingly powerful Ku Klux Klan in the region. He was thus helping to usher in a new era of politics in the state, one that was more democratic and open to more than the elite families in charge before the Civil War. While sitting in on a local Democratic meeting, ostensibly open to the public, at the Yanceyville courthouse in End Page 399 the spring of 1870, Stephens was seen entering the basement with several prominent party leaders. His body was found the next day. Swanson's work reviews the court cases involving the accused murderers (no one was ever prosecuted) as well as the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the Piedmont and its role in Stephens's death before placing the murder in the larger context of historical memory. Stephens's life was used by white supremacists in the state as an example of what could happen if Reconstruction policies were allowed to go too far. If his life in post– Civil War North Carolina represented the promises of Reconstruction for middle-class white men as well as African Americans, then the violence surrounding Stephens's death illustrated its failures. Using the works of various North Carolina literary figures and historians, Swanson charts the ways that Stephens's life was first vilified and then celebrated through the twentieth century, illustrating the ways in which one man's story shows the complexities of Reconstruction and the "centrality of race in southern history" (6). The book ends as it begins—with the almost unbelievable story of a contemporary of John Stephens, John Lea, visiting the office of the North Carolina Historical Commission in. . .