The Lakotas and the Black Hills

Jeffrey Ostler. The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground. New York: Penguin Books, 2010.

This short, readable popular history is a good introduction to the history of the dispossession of the Lakota peoples' claims to the Black Hills, and subsequent legal battles to have those claims recognized, compensated, and addressed. It also touches on issues of the legitimacy of Indian claims to first sovereignty in general, as the Lakota people were arguably relative to the Black Hills, who replaced earlier Indian people from whom they might have acquired some of their mythologies and spiritual beliefs connected to the landscape and specific places.

One of the arguments used to justify the dispossession of the Lakota was to rely ohn reports which downplayed their presence in, and longtime residency in, the Black Hills--Ostler makes a compelling argument that such claims, when not completely dishonest, relied on a misunderstanding of the ways in which the Lakota used the resources of the Black Hills and focused their cultural and spiritual practices on specific places in the landscape.

A better understanding of the Lakota people are their claims to the Black Hills should help readers develop a broader appreciation for how impossibly rigorous standards of legitimacy and historical veracity have been wielded by State governments and Federal authorities to undermine Indian sovereignty and access to judicial recourse. The second half of this book, which follows the long, still-unfinished legal battle for recognition of Lakota claims, is also a reminder that Indian history didn't end with the end of the Treaty period, or with the confinement to reservations at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Romance of Reunion

Nina Silber. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

The story of Reconstruction, the Redemption of white rule, and the eventual "reunion" of the Northern and Southern whites a few decades after the end of the Civil War--at the expense of African-Americans, who were pointedly "written out" of the national narrative--is frequently told from the Southern point of view. It was the defeated former Confederacy which had to reckon with the specter of defeat, the unsettling of old racial caste norms, the newly enfranchised African-American vote, the attitude of victorious Northerners, and the prospect of having to redefine their place in the very country they fought four years to dismember.

Silber looks at the story from the perspective of the white North. She finds that in many ways, this is actually a gender history--Northerners, as she points out, had their own anxieties and fears to work out, and they did so partly by casting the South as a feminine contrast to their own presumed masculine mastery and strength.

At the same time, white Northern attitudes towards freedmen would shift along with anxieties about working class agitation and concerns about increased levels of immigration--the notion that Southern whites might understand "the Negro problem" best allowed Northerners both to cease worrying about the consequences of abandoning Reconstruction and it promises, and to allow Southern whites a subsidiary but respectable role in enforcing social and political harmony in "their" section of the country.

Ben Tillman & The Reconstruction of White Supremacy

Stephen Kantrowitz. Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Ben Tillman was a key political figure in South Carolina from late Reconstruction through the early Progressive Era. Beginning as a terrorist opposing Reconstruction rule and Black political participation, he parlayed his early prominence as an unapologetic leader of the "Red Shirt" militias into a long career as a Democratic Party operative, Governor, and finally several terms in the US Senate. Well known as one of the leading figures in the campaign to restore white supremacy and create the Jim Crow state, "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman proudly and shrewdly deployed his propensity for violence both rhetorical and physical to back him his national image as a crude but determined representative of the common (white) man.

Kantrowitz approaches Tillman's career from two vantage points. On the one hand, he considers the ways in which Tillman and his supporters conceptualized "whiteness". Tillman applied both racial and gendered facets to his conception of what made a truly "White" man. Tillman based his notion of whiteness on a Jeffersonian producerist idealization of the independent white farmer.

This played into the second facet of Tillman's life--his frequent rhetorical flirtations with radicalism and agrarian populism. Many observers at the time assumed Tillman was a Populist and even a Progressive (early in his career he promoted agricultural reform and education), and many historians and biographers since have followed suit. But Kantrowitz points out that Tillman himself was actually a substantial landowner (and the son of a planter) rather than one of the simple farmers he claimed to champion. More importantly, his commitment to agrarian reform and Progressive measures was severely limited by his primary commitment--to white supremhacy as he understood it. Maintaining the latter meant often sacrificing the best interests of many common whites, for fear of empowering or allowing a political opening to African-Americans.

In the end, Tillman's brand of white supremacy could only be maintained at a heavy cost--a willingness to engage in violence against both Blacks and Whites who failed to adhere to rigidly defined social roles would be coupled with a serious undermining of democratic participation, and economic stagnation. Tillman died feeling pessimistic that his system could survive. He was right, but it would take several more decades and much more suffering before his toxic legacy of a politically and legally enforced formal caste system would be undone.