Representations of Violence During Reconstruction: the Mississippi Plan and the Democratic Press (1874-1876) (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798277367322)

In the decade following the fall of the Confederacy, southern white citizens struggled to reconcile themselves with the vast political and social upheaval brought on by defeat. This localised study of Mississippi between 1874 and 1876 examines the emergence of the Mississippi Plan, a concerted reign of terror that swept the state from the summer of 1874 onward, and the decisive role of the Democratic press in shaping its meaning, motives, and methods.

Set in what a contemporary novelist described as a "frontier state with frontier habits," the work traces how many white Mississippians, unreconciled to Black suffrage and Radical Republican governance, came to rationalise violence as political necessity. The resulting Mississippi Plan was designed to counter African American suffrage, the foundation of Black and Radical Republican political power.

Told through the lens of the Democratic press, the study explores how editors, by cloaking electoral terror in the colour-blind language of tax reform and anti-corruption, recast a campaign of racial domination as a principled struggle for good governance. In doing so, they transformed the press from a mere observer into an active agent in Reconstruction's unravelling, revealing how print culture legitimised, galvanised, and ultimately masked the violent path to white 'Redemption'.