Ben Tillman & the reconstruction of white supremacy
By: Stephen Kantrowitz.
Series: The Fred W. Morrison series in Southern studies
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 422
ISBN-13: 9780807825303
Subjects: Tillman, Benjamin R. 1847-1918; United States. Congress. Senate -- Biography; Legislators -- United States -- Biography; White supremacy movements -- Southern States -- History; Men, White -- Southern States -- Political activity -- History; Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877); Political culture -- Southern States; Southern States -- Race relations; South Carolina -- Politics and government -- 1865-1950
Genres: Biography.
Other titles: Ben Tillman and the reconstruction of white supremacy
Description: "Through the life of Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina's self-styled agrarian rebel, this book traces the history of white male supremacy and its discontents from the era of plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow. Born into a wealthy slaveholding family, Tillman spent his career attempting to re-create the world he had lost. As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla and local Democratic activist, he helped defeat black and white challenges to white supremacy.

Later, during two terms as governor and four as U.S. senator, he steered a complicated political course between conservatives and Populists, seeking a balance of local control and state-level reform that would protect white men and their households from federal intrusion, "Negro domination," and the machinations of the "money power."".

"Friend and foe alike - and generations of historians - interpreted Tillman's physical and rhetorical violence in defense of white supremacy not as part of a strategy to maintain social and political authority but as a matter of racial and gender instinct. This book instead reveals that Tillman's white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [367]-396) and index.