A mid-level Confederate official and lawyer in secessionist North
Carolina, David Schenck (1835-1902) penned extensive diaries that
have long been a wellspring of information for historians. In the
midst of the secession crisis, Schenck overcame long-established
social barriers and reshaped antebellum notions of manhood,
religion, and respectability into the image of a Confederate
nationalist. He helped found the revolutionary States' Rights Party
and relentlessly pursued his vision of an idealized Southern
society even after the collapse of the Confederacy. In the first
biography of this complicated figure, Rodney Steward opens a window
into the heart and soul of the Confederate South's burgeoning
professional middle class and reveals the complex set of desires,
aspirations, and motivations that inspired men like Schenck to cast
for themselves a Confederate identity that would endure the trials
of war, the hardship of Reconstruction, and the birth of a New
South. After secession, Schenck remained on the home front as a
receiver under the Act of Sequestration, enriching himself on the
confiscated property of those he accused of disloyalty. After the
war, his position as a leader in the Ku Klux Klan and his
resistance to Radical Reconstruction policies won him a seat on the
superior court bench, but scathing newspaper articles about his
past upended a bid for chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme
Court, a compelling fall from grace that reveals much about the
shifting currents in North Carolina society and politics in the
years after Reconstruction. During the last twenty years of his
life, spent in Greensboro, Schenck created the Guilford
Battleground Company in an effort to redeem the honor of the Tar
Heels who fought there and his own honor as well. Schenck's life
story provides a powerful new lens to examine and challenge widely
held interpretations of secessionists, Confederate identity, Civil
War economics, and home-front policies. Far more than a standard
biography, this compelling volume challenges the historiography of
the Confederacy at many levels and offers a sophisticated analysis
of the evolution of a Confederate identity over a half century.
Rodney Steward is an assistant professor of history at the
University of South Carolina, Salkehatchie. His works have appeared
in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Encyclopedia of
North Carolina, and North Carolina Historical Review.|A mid-level
Confederate official and lawyer in secessionist North Carolina,
David Schenck (1835-1902) penned extensive diaries that have long
been a wellspring of information for historians. In the midst of
the secession crisis, Schenck overcame long-established social
barriers and reshaped antebellum notions of manhood, religion, and
respectability into the image of a Confederate nationalist. He
helped found the revolutionary States' Rights Party and
relentlessly pursued his vision of an idealized Southern society
even after the collapse of the Confederacy. In the first biography
of this complicated figure, Rodney Steward opens a window into the
heart and soul of the Confederate South's burgeoning professional
middle class and reveals the complex set of desires, aspirations,
and motivations that inspired men like Schenck to cast for
themselves a Confederate identity that would endure the trials of
war, the hardship of Reconstruction, and the birth of a New South.
After secession, Schenck remained on the home front as a receiver
under the Act of Sequestration, enriching himself on the
confiscated property of those he accused of disloyalty. After the
war, his position as a leader in the Ku Klux Klan and his
resistance to Radical Reconstruction policies won him a seat on the
superior court bench, but scathing newspaper articles about his
past upended a bid for chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme
Court, a compelling fall from grace that reveals much about the
shifting currents in North Carolina society and politics in the
years after Reconstruction. During the last twenty years of his
life, spent in Greensboro, Schenck created the Guilford
Battleground Company in an effort to redeem the honor of the Tar
Heels who fought there and his own honor as well. Schenck's life
story provides a powerful new lens to examine and challenge widely
held interpretations of secessionists, Confederate identity, Civil
War economics, and home-front policies. Far more than a standard
biography, this compelling volume challenges the historiography of
the Confederacy at many levels and offers a sophisticated analysis
of the evolution of a Confederate identity over a half century.
Rodney Steward is an assistant professor of history at the
University of South Carolina, Salkehatchie. His works have appeared
in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Encyclopedia of
North Carolina, and North Carolina Historical Review.
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