Chesnutt, Turpentine, and the Political Ecology of White Supremacy

PMLA ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 136 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-54
Author(s):  
Mary Kuhn
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The Political ◽  
The South ◽  
Health Tourism ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Ecological Vision

AbstractCharles Chesnutt's fiction describes the forests of North Carolina not as the unspoiled wildernesses of the popular imagination but instead as an integral part of the extractive economy of the South. In the postbellum decades, many northerners visited the state's forests for health tourism even as the turpentine and lumber industries were decimating the local pine. By drawing on his readers’ familiarity with turpentine, a pine product that was both a household staple and a global commodity, Chesnutt shows his readers how the pine woods were anything but bucolic. Chesnutt's ecological vision disrupts the centrality of cotton in the environmental imaginary of the plantation and postplantation South. By linking the rise of conservation efforts to the logic of preserving white health, Chesnutt reveals that both deforestation and conservation were driven by the operations of white supremacy.

We So-Called Free Moderns

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ritterhouse
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
University Of North Carolina ◽  
The South ◽  
Thomas Wolfe ◽  
Southern Renaissance ◽  
The University

This chapter provides biographical background on Jonathan Daniels. His education at the University of North Carolina, ambitions as a novelist, and publication of Clash of Angels (1930) are highlighted. The death in childbirth of his first wife, Elizabeth Bridgers Daniels, made it difficult for the grieving Daniels to complete a second, satirical novel that might have been his entry into the developing Southern Renaissance alongside his former classmate Thomas Wolfe. The liberal-minded editorials Daniels wrote after taking over from his father as editor of the Raleigh News and Observer in 1933 are contrasted with Josephus Daniels's role in North Carolina's "white supremacy campaign" of 1898 that resulted in the Wilmington massacre. Jonathan's liberalism reflected the influence of other white southern liberals such as Regionalist sociologist Howard Odum and publisher W. T. Couch. New York editor Harold Strauss encouraged Daniels to write a book about the South, resulting in his journey.

Rebels in the Making

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Barney
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Political History ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
The Political ◽  
The South ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Small Minority ◽  
Upper South ◽  
Lower South

Rebels in the Making narrates and interprets secession in the fifteen slave states in 1860–1861. It is a political history informed by the socioeconomic structures of the South and the varying forms they took across the region. It explains how a small minority of Southern radicals exploited the hopes and fears of Southern whites over slavery after Lincoln’s election in November of 1860 to create and lead a revolutionary movement with broad support, especially in the Lower South. It reveals a divided South in which the commitment to secession was tied directly to the extent of slave ownership and the political influence of local planters. White fears over the future of slavery were at the center of the crisis, and the refusal of Republicans to sanction the expansion of slavery doomed efforts to reach a sectional compromise. In January 1861, six states in the Lower South joined South Carolina in leaving the Union, and delegates from the seceded states organized a Confederate government in February. Lincoln’s call for troops to uphold the Union after the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861 finally pushed the reluctant states of the Upper South to secede in defense of slavery and white supremacy.

Fighting the Octopus

2019 ◽  
pp. 198-230
Author(s):  
R. Scott Huffard
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
New South ◽  
The South ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Economic Depression

This chapter focuses on the creation and expansion of the Southern Railway corporation and the ways in which the corporation overcame anti-monopoly sentiment in the South. While the company styled itself as an embodiment of the New South, northern capitalist J.P. Morgan financed its reorganization, and its expansion engendered resistance in Georgia and North Carolina. This chapter traces the origins of this company in the economic depression and wave of railroad bankruptcies in the 1890s and notes the attempts to brand this new company as a southern enterprise under the leadership of its first president Samuel Spencer. The chapter then traces resistance to the new company in Georgia and North Carolina, two states in which the Southern Railway tried to purchase other railroads. Foes of the railroad, which formed a broad coalition of Populists, Democrats, and other anti-monopolists, labelled the road as an “octopus” for its monopolistic tendencies. In two case study states – Georgia and North Carolina – appeals to white supremacy and elections marked with violence, as in the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, defeated the anti-monopoly critique and preserved the power and size of the Southern Railway.

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