A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction by Drew A. Swanson (review)

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• A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction by Drew A. Swanson
• Elijah Gaddis

A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction. By Drew A. Swanson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 206. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7471-1; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7470-4.)

It is a shopworn cliché among scholars of the South that the events and people we study are intimately tied to the places of their origin. At least since Eudora Welty and U. B. Phillips, we have endeavored to consider the South not just through regionality but also through the landscapes of the social worlds we study. These are big-picture currents. I mention them because Drew A. Swanson’s slim new volume, A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction, [End Page 629] builds on this tradition and admirably complicates our understanding of the experience of Reconstruction and the landscape of the southern Piedmont.

While not a complete reorientation toward the study of space and away from time, A Man of Bad Reputation gives weight to a broad temporal and spatial scope while nominally focusing on a single event. Swanson uses the 1870 assassination of North Carolina state senator John Stephens as a jumping- off point for a broad consideration of the experience of Reconstruction. Crucially, he does not confine that consideration to the years of Reconstruction alone, but shows instead how the idea of Reconstruction continued to be an animating force in Caswell County and throughout North Carolina long after its nominal conclusion. This book is concerned not just with memory, but also with the continual unfolding and narration of events over a longer duration. It is not the much-abused longue durée of the Annales school, but rather part of an important trend in recent southern historiography that recognizes the continual overlaps of historical production with what we often call memory.

The story of John Stephens’s killing unfolds over six chapters and an epilogue. More accurately, the book’s subject is “the ghost of John Stephens” read backward and forward (p. 4). Swanson’s introduction sets out the scale under which he is considering Reconstruction: his focus is on “hinge[s]” and other moments of both turmoil and possibility on the ground (p. 3). Other chapters read the Civil War through the agricultural and environmental lens of the Piedmont (chapter 1, “Promise”) or the tenuous politics of mobility and labor in the immediate aftermath of the war (chapter 3, “Perdition”). Most often the titular character of the book is its subordinate character. The specter of Stephens is a backdrop to Swanson’s fine treatment of the threats represented by arson (chapter 3, “Pyrrhic Victories”) or the later uses, professional and vernacular, of the Reconstruction past (chapter 6, “Prior Appropriation”).

Every chapter here is likely to be of significant use to scholars of the era and region, however broadly construed those might be. The book is briskly paced and narratively driven. That is a significant accomplishment considering the ground that it covers. I sometimes wished for a greater balance between the North Carolina Piedmont of the imagination and the material changes to the region’s environment. The state and its history have been significantly impacted by perception, but the intellectual distance that creates does sometimes get in the way of the recounting of experience unfolding. No book can do everything, but it is a testament to Swanson’s skills as a researcher and writer that A Man of Bad Reputation does so much. It is a smart and capacious book with much to say about the scope and scale of history and the insights we can derive from it.

Elijah Gaddis Auburn University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...