Carin Peller-Semmens's Unreconstructed grapples with the longstanding, systemic effects of white supremacist brutality in northwest Louisiana, highlighting the constancy of racial subjugation in one of the most violent areas of the South. Tracing the commitment of the region's white slaveholders to racial violence from antebellum enslavement through to Reconstruction, Peller-Semmens unearths the durable ideology of mastery in the Red River region. She demonstrates that white supremacy and vigilante violence were slaveholding recloaked, and became effective, calibrated tools of political, social, and economic control during Reconstruction. White supremacist violence-demonstrative, controlling, and visceral-attempted to redress mastery and subjugate and subdue newly emancipated Black individuals, imposing parameters on freedom. Unreconstructed shows that white violence and racial control were foundational elements of the regional ideology and identity that Reconstruction galvanized. This ideology of mastery transcended class, creating a shared ethos steeped in racist behavior that remained crucial to postwar conceptions of white selfhood. Barbarity, harnessed boldly and overtly, formed the apex of a diversified campaign of persistent violence that chipped away at freedpeople's experience of freedom and resulted in several seismic incidents of racial violence, including the massacres at Shady Grove, Colfax, and Coushatta. Peller-Semmens's arguments concerning racial power structures speak to race issues prevalent in America today, contributing significantly to a vibrant discourse on the inheritances of slavery and Reconstruction. Indeed, the implications of Reconstruction violence in this region still reverberate nationwide, making this corner of the South integral to the larger narrative of southern racism, white supremacy, and segregation.
Carin Peller-Semmens is a historian of nineteenth-century American history educated at Mount Holyoke College, Rutgers University, and the University of Sussex. She lives in Edinburgh with her family.
"Few regions experienced more turbulence and violence during Reconstruction than Louisiana's Red River. Peller-Semmens's richly textured analysis examines violent racial exploitation, frontier-market integration, environmental transformation, vigilantism, and civil war in this troubled region. Unreconstructed is the finest account yet of how the defiant planter class turned to terrorism to reestablish white supremacy in northwest Louisiana."--Aaron Astor, author of Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri "Northern Louisiana is often marginalized within the story of southern racial violence. Peller-Semmens expertly mobilizes the archives to refocus our attention on the Red River region. She describes in remarkably granular detail how whites exploited Black people through a densely intertwined system of economic and violent control, and traces its transformation from the slavery period through the Civil War and Reconstruction. This book is the last word in the grisly history of race relations in northwestern Louisiana, and necessary reading for those interested in how violent racist control intertwined with the white elite's economic incentives and strategies in this distinct and bloody region."--Elaine Frantz Parsons, author of Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction "Peller-Semmens offers a provocative examination of white supremacist violence and entrenched systems of racial oppression that shaped northwest Louisiana during the long Civil War era. Meticulous archival research reveals how white elites consolidated political and economic control, while African Americans struggled for freedom. This compelling study illuminates the complex interplay of race and power, shedding new light on a dark chapter of American history and its enduring legacy."--David Silkenat, author of Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South "The all-too-timely appearance of Carin Peller-Semmens's Unreconstructed: Slavery and Emancipation on Louisiana's Red River, 1820-1880 reflects a larger story that endures: how white supremacist violence was used in the wake of the Civil War to create a vigilantism that has shaped racial reckonings in the modern South. Her retelling and reframing of the Colfax Massacre recovers the voices of those who might have escaped slavery but not the brutal consequences of paramilitary violence, and her relevant mapping of memory on historical events presents a familiar yet striking appreciation of Louisiana's emblematic role in resistance to implementing Black equality or racial justice."--Catherine Clinton, author of Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War "This book examines one of the most violent places in the post-Civil War South, Louisiana's Red River valley, which historians have often overlooked. The study of this underexplored region offers a fresh look at the origins of racial terrorism during Reconstruction, the hellish consequences of a small planter's paradise. It is a story that deserves to be told."--Michael W. Fitzgerald, author of Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South "This study of the violent creation and equally violent re-creation of the cotton economy produced through enslaved labor in the Red River region is a terrific example of serious and meaningful history. Carin Peller-Semmens's careful examination of voluminous archival records, deep attention to freedpeople's actions to control their lives and labor, wise intervention in the ongoing scholarly debates about slavery and capitalism, and emphasis on violence add up to a rich and compelling analysis of an important yet understudied region."--Gregory P. Downs, author of After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War "What would the cotton plantations of the American South have looked like had the rapacious instincts of white supremacy been given free rein to use completely unchecked violence against Black workers in pursuit of profits? That hellscape would have been Louisiana's Red River region in the nineteenth century. The region's history is meticulously chronicled in Peller-Semmens's book, from the establishment of plantations in the 1820s, through the Civil War and emancipation, to the snuffing out of the final flicker of hope that freedom and nominal political rights could improve the situation for African Americans."--Bruce E. Baker, author of This Mob Will Surely Take My Life: Lynchings in the Carolinas, 1871-1947
