The following letter of support was filed with Newt Knight’s 1870 petition for compensation. I particularly value this letter because it describes in the men’s own words the formation of the Knight […]
Riley J. Collins post on Southern Unionists Chronicles
For those of you following the Collins family posts, please don’t miss my post on the Union pension file of Riley J. Collins over at Southern Unionists Chronicles. Riley was brother to Simeon and Jasper […]
Simeon Collins: An Important Family Link Between Mississippi and Texas
By Vikki Bynum As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, and after exchanging emails with Greg Rowe, (see blogroll, American Civil War Essays & Research), I decided to write a bit about Greg’s […]
Collins Family Unionism, Mississippi to Texas
By Vikki Bynum We’ve all the heard the cliché “truth is stranger than fiction,” but it’s always amazing to find an historical event that one can only imagine happening in a novel. […]
Kill or be Killed: Bill Owens’s Guerrilla War
Continuing my focus on North Carolina Unionists, the following is an excerpt from the essay “Guerrilla Wars,” chapter one of The Long Shadow of the Civil War. The ruthlessness of the Bill Owens […]
Unionists at War in the N.C. Quaker Belt
Unionist communities existed throughout the Confederate South during the Civil War. “The Free State of Jones” is an exciting story with its own unique characteristics, but it was only one of many inner civil wars between Unionists and Confederates […]
The Multiracial Knight Women During the 20th Century
By Vikki Bynum Newt Knight’s political career was short-circuited by his open embrace of his mixed-race descendants. The essay, “Negotiating Boundaries of Race and Gender in Jim Crow Mississippi,” which appears as […]
Unionists, Populists, Socialists: Mississippi and Texas
This is my first post since “Guerrilla Wars” that highlights the East Texas component of Long Shadow of the Civil War. The essay “Civil War Unionists as New South Radicals: Mississippi and Texas, 1865-1920” links […]
Newt Knight vs. The U.S. Court of Claims
Newt Knight was relentless in his efforts to gain compensation for himself and his men from the U.S. Government for having served the Union. I barely touched on his history of claims […]
The Ku Klux Klan in Post-Civil War North Carolina
I think of historians as investigative journalists of the past. I especially feel that way when I write an essay or book based on court records. My first book, Unruly Women, was such a work, and […]
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