“Alarming Symptoms”: Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots and the Use of Antihistory in Systemic Voter Suppression

This article uses The Leopard’s Spots, the first novel by notorious white supremacist Thomas Dixon, to examine the tactics that white supremacists used to establish one-party oligarchy in the South in the late nineteenth century. The Leopard’s Spots downplays the voter suppression and vicious political violence that white supremacists perpetrated in North Carolina in the 1870s and 1890s, manufacturing nonexistent political and social problems involving allegedly incompetent African American voters that “necessitated” a forceful response from whites to “save” what they referred to as Anglo-Saxon civilization. The novel largely ignores white supremacists’ systemic restructuring of state and local governments to ensure that North Carolina remained a one-party state controlled by white North Carolinians. The constant threat of violence against African Americans and “outside agitators” supported a gerrymandered, closed system that vigilantes helped establish. Primary sources reveal how variations on Dixon’s views came to permeate American society and prop up Southern state governments. The article also explores whether twenty-first-century politics contain echoes of Dixon and white supremacists of his generation.