Reviewed by: Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender and Citizenship in the Postwar South by Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle John C. Inscoe Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender and Citizenship in the Postwar South. By Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 412.) From Robert Lively’s Fiction Fights the Civil War (1957) to Edmond Wilson’s Patriotic Gore (1962) and Stephen Cushman’s Belligerent Muse (2014), the literary legacy of the Civil War has long been a scholarly staple. Only within the last few years has similar scrutiny been applied to Reconstruction, with Sharon Kennedy-Nolle’s aptly titled study appearing as the most recent and among the most substantive contributions. Through a series of case studies, each representing one of the five military districts into which the former Confederacy was divided at war’s end (a somewhat contrived framing device), she examines a literary output that dramatized the promise of the federal government’s Reconstruction agenda for a radical restructuring of southern society [End Page 84] in which freedmen and women exercised newly acquired rights and opportunities. Four of her five chapters focus on individual writers and usually a single novel by each. George Washington Cable of New Orleans, and the author of The Grandissimes (1880), is the only native white southerner in the mix. Three others were northern transplants to the postwar south: New England–born Constance Fenimore Woolson, who wintered in St. Augustine, Florida, through much of the 1870s and wrote a series of travel sketches and short stories promoting tourism in that most remote of Confederate states; Ohio carpetbagger Albion Tourgee, who became a judge in Greensboro, North Carolina, and wrote a series of novels based on his contentious experiences there, including his first, Toinette (1874); and the lesser-known Iowan Octave Thanet, who based her novel Expiation (1890) on her part-time residence on an Arkansas plantation in the 1880s. Kennedy-Nolle provides very close, insightful readings of these works, devoting much of her analysis to their African American or mixed-race characters (including Seminoles and Minorcans featured in Woolson’s sketches and both black and white Creoles in Cable’s novel), who emerged after the war as vital and vibrant parts of newly acculturated communities in both urban and rural settings. She is especially attuned to strong female characters, whose agency and influence in both private and public spheres these authors saw as integral in shaping this promising new social and political order. Breaking from this pattern of single writer case studies is a far more expansive fifth chapter that will be of particular interest to readers of this journal. In it, Kennedy-Nolle turns to Storer College, established in 1867 for newly freed African Americans in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, to examine more academic and journalistic contexts for this advocacy of a lasting Reconstruction legacy. She focuses on three individuals—Sarah Jane Foster, a white Baptist freedmen’s teacher who faced considerable harassment during her brief tenure there, and two former Storer students (then alumni), John Clifford and Coralie Franklin (curiously the only black writers featured in the book). Through Clifford’s The Pioneer Press, the era’s longest-running African American newspaper, and other outlets, the two urged Harper’s Ferry’s black community to defend their civil rights while also pushing an agenda of socioeconomic and cultural uplift. Throughout Kennedy-Nolle makes clear that the impact of these literary and journalistic moral imperatives was reliant on an expanding and diversifying American (and largely northern) print culture in the later nineteenth century. Yet their endeavors to inspire and sustain long-term commitments to the ideals of Reconstruction were ultimately overpowered by Lost Cause, Redemption, and Jim Crow imperatives, driven by even more effective rhetorical and literary forces, as chronicled by an equally valuable counternarrative to Kennedy-Nolle’s study, K. Stephen Prince’s Stories of the South: Race and the [End Page 85] Reconstruction of Southern Identity (2014). Despite such setbacks, she fully demonstrates that “in fashioning their stories into fictional test cases of the Reconstruction Amendments,” her writers “helped limn the nation’s future while reconstructing its past” (22). In making that case, she provides us...
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Mar 7, 2023
Rhiannon Easterbrook 
Open Access