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

Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Stephens fought for the rights of freedpeople, and his killing by the Ku Klux Klan ultimately led to insurrection, Governor William W. Holden's impeachment, and the early unwinding of Reconstruction in North Carolina. In recounting Stephens's murder, the subsequent investigation and court proceedings, and the long-delayed confessions that revealed what actually happened at the courthouse in 1870, Drew A. Swanson tells a story of race, politics, and social power shaped by violence and profit. The struggle for dominance in Reconstruction-era rural North Carolina, Swanson argues, was an economic and ecological transformation. Arson, beating, and murder became tools to control people and landscapes, and the ramifications of this violence continued long afterward. The failure to prosecute anyone for decades after John Stephens's assassination left behind a vacuum, as each side shaped its own memory of Stephens and his murder. The malleability of and contested storytelling around Stephens's legacy presents a window into the struggle to control the future of the South.

About the Author :
Drew A. Swanson is Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Distinguished Professor of Southern History at Georgia Southern University.

Review :
"Meticulously researched. . . . A Man of Bad Reputation makes an important contribution to the historiography of Reconstruction. . . . Swanson's history fills [a] gap."--American Historical Review "Well researched and well written. . . . Both authorities and new students of the period will want to read the volume."--Journal of American History "Swanson does fine work revealing the complexity of [Stephen's] political, environmental, and economic context, and he provides the reader with an impression of who the man may have been."--Agricultural History "This work serves two significant purposes: Swanson discusses in detail the historiography of Reconstruction (beginning with the infamous Dunning school) and illustrates the importance microhistories can have in challenging that historiography. . . . Using one man's tragic death, Swanson does a wonderful job of reshaping our understanding of Reconstruction and its effects in North Carolina."--Journal of the Civil War Era "A Man of Bad Reputation . . . admirably complicates our understanding of the experience of Reconstruction and the landscape of the southern Piedmont. . . . [I]t is a testament to Swanson's skills as a researcher and writer that [this book] does so much. It is a smart and capacious book with much to say about the scope and scale of history and the insights we can derive from it."--Journal of Southern History "A short, crisply written account . . . . Swanson has a feel for human drama and for Caswell County itself, set amid the "rolling red clay hills" of a once-prosperous tobacco-growing region whose inhabitants were divided almost equally between white and black . . . . a valuable contribution to the literature of Reconstruction."--Wall Street Journal "Drawing on personal testimony, newspaper reports, and period correspondence, Swanson attempts to reconstruct John Stephens's life--and to show how his murder shaped North Carolina politics for years to come."--The Civil War Monitor "Swanson [has] made strong additions to North Carolina's Reconstruction historiography. . . . I strongly encourage readers interested in North Carolina during Reconstruction to read [this book] in order to grasp the tumultuous life and tragic death of State Senator John W. Stephens."--North Carolina Historical Review