Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Who Killed John Clayton?: Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861-1893

Who Killed John Clayton?: Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861-1893

Barnes, Kenneth C.

Paperback

19th Century United States HistoryGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesGeneral United States History

ISBN10: 082232072X
ISBN13: 9780822320722
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Feb 16 1998
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.77
Height: 0.64 Width: 5.73 Depth: 9.18
Language: English
In 1888 a group of armed and masked Democrats stole a ballot box from a small town in Conway County, Arkansas. The box contained most of the county's black Republican votes, thereby assuring defeat for candidate John Clayton in a close race for the U.S. Congress. Days after he announced he would contest the election, a volley of buckshot ripped through Clayton's hotel window, killing him instantly. Thus began a yet-to-be-solved, century-old mystery.

More than a description of this particular event, however, Who Killed John Clayton? traces patterns of political violence in this section of the South over a three-decade period. Using vivid courtroom-type detail, Barnes describes how violence was used to define and control the political system in the post-Reconstruction South and how this system in turn produced Jim Crow. Although white Unionists and freed blacks had joined under the banner of the Republican Party and gained the upper hand during Reconstruction, during these last decades of the nineteenth century conservative elites, first organized as the Ku Klux Klan and then as the revived Democratic Party, regained power-via such tactics as murdering political opponents, lynching blacks, and defrauding elections.

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