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David Walsh: First, can you tell us something about your background and
how you made your way to the study in particular of Southern Unionism
and opposition to the Confederacy?
Victoria Bynum: I don’t come from an academic background. Neither of my
parents had a high school education. My dad was born in Jones County,
Mississippi, but he left the state at age 17 to join the military.
That’s how he made his living; he was a master sergeant by the time he
retired. In my family, work was valued over education.
I grew up in the fifties and sixties, during the era of the Civil Rights
movement. Influenced by my mother, who supported racial equality, I was
very affected by this period. Over time, I developed a strong desire to
go to college, and at age 26 began taking classes at a community
college. To cut to the chase, my early interest in the history of race
and social class emerged from my own experiences. When I began college I
was a divorced mother on welfare. Pursuing a doctorate in history
required a long economic struggle, one that ended after I finally
obtained my degree and began teaching at Texas State University.
I began my college research with an interest in “free people of color,”
the designation applied to free people before the Civil War. I was
initially intrigued by a black friend’s insistence that his Virginia
ancestors had never been slaves. That seemed to me unusual, and it
piqued my interest in Old South history. Along the way, I became
interested in both free black women and white women who lived outside
the planter class. Those interests resulted in my dissertation (and
first book), Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in
the Old South.
While working on my dissertation, “Unruly Women,” I expanded my research
into the Civil War, and that’s where I discovered Southern Unionism. The
records were full of evidence of dissent and insurrections by common
people, and it fascinated me. Here were white non-slaveholding men,
women who allied with them, free people of color and slaves—all engaged
in acts of subversion against the Confederacy. I had never known that
actions like these occurred on the Civil War home front.
I was only studying North Carolina at the time. But, in the back of my
mind, I remembered the story of Jones County, Mississippi, because my
father was from there. I remembered reading years earlier in a footnote
the legend of how the county supposedly seceded from the Confederacy. I
didn’t really know what it meant for a county to “secede” from the
Confederacy, but it got my attention. So after I completed Unruly Women,
which included two chapters on Southern Unionism, I decided to make my
second book about the county in which my father was born.
It was a hard history to write because there were not nearly the court
records documenting the Jones County insurrection as I’d found for Civil
War North Carolina. The North Carolina governors’ papers, court and
legislative papers, are filled with information on insurrections and
inner civil wars for several parts of the state, not just one. The
Mississippi archives offered less evidence, but, in many ways, offered
the most interesting guerrilla leader of all, Newton Knight.
In writing The Free State of Jones, I decided to draw a broader picture
of the region’s insurrection by tracing the historical roots of its
peoples’ ideas about authority, power and legitimate government. That’s
why the book begins with the American Revolution––and even before. After
finishing that book, I expanded my research on Southern Unionism into Texas.
So I’ve now published works that trace both the roots of Southern
Unionism and the eruption of Civil War guerrilla warfare in three
different states. As the stories of Unionism became ever more
interesting, it also became evident to me that they are an important and
largely unknown part of American history. Even though there have been
numerous studies by various historians—I’m not the only one by any
stretch—the stories never seem to move far beyond academia and into the
popular mainstream and consciousness. That’s what I find so exciting
about Free State of Jones, the movie.
full: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/07/12/byn1-j12.html
part 2 of interview:
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/07/13/byn2-j13.html
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