Dixie After The War: An Exposition Of Social Conditions Existing In The South, During The Twelve-yea

by Myrta Lockett Avary

1906. An Exposition of Social Conditions Existing in the South During the Twelve Years Succeeding the Fall of Richmond. This book may be called a revelation. It seems to me a body of discoveries that should not be kept from the public-discoveries which have origin in many sources but are here brought together in one book for the first time. No book, hitherto published portrays so fully and graphically the social conditions existing in the South for the twelve years following the fall of Richmond. None so vividly presents race problems. It is the kind of history a witness gives. The author received from observers and participants the larger part of the incidents and anecdotes which she employs.

Genres: History

435 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1906

About the author

From Wikipedia article below:

Myrta Lockett Avary (December 7, 1857 – February 14, 1946) was an American white supremacist, author, and journalist. Her books include Dixie After the War (1906), The Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens (1910) and Uncle Remus and the Wren's Nest (1913). She died on February 14, 1946, in Atlanta.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrta_L...

Reviews

[Isidore · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had often seen Avary's book cited in Reconstruction bibliographies, and a few particularly intriguing references to her work finally made me curious enough to track down a copy.

Reading it shortly after Kate Cumming's wartime journal made for a striking contrast. Forty years passed between the composition of the two books, and where Kate is grim, bitter, and firmly rooted in the realities of war, Avary is remote, proper, and, if I may say so, artificial. By 1906 genuflection before the altar of American nationalism was obligatory, and Avary is careful to say as many nice things about the soldiers in blue as she can, and her professions of love for the centralized state and stars-and-stripes are frequent; Kate would have hooted in derision at all this, and made snide comments about the alleged nobility of the Northern soldier.

Beneath the conciliatory surface, however, Avary also harbours deep resentments about past grievances; the difference is that, for Kate, the substance of the grievances was before her eyes, while for Avary it had become the matter of yarns and old men's tales.

Judging from the way other authors have used her work, I expected Avary's book to be a catalogue of horrors, based on personal observation; I was therefore quite surprised to find that she actually set out to write a sort of popular history of the era. There is an unexpected amount of highly partisan but otherwise conventional historical narrative in the book. What lends it interest is that prior to writing she set out to contact survivors of the Reconstruction era and got them to tell her stories about their experiences. A pioneer oral historian, she has supplied later scholars with lively, personalized sidelights on events which would otherwise be lost to history. Unfortunately, oral history being what it is, much of it must be taken with liberal doses of salt.

Given her elevated social status, she clearly had no trouble accessing old politicians and plantation owners (Thomas Pinckney's account of postwar turbulence on his South Carolina property is one of the most vivid and believable episodes in the book), but she also condescended to consult a few "friendly" black people, old family retainers and the like. However, there were plainly limits beyond which she would not go, so don't expect to hear from Radical Republicans or resentful former slaves. Since most of the great figures of the period were dead, she had to content herself with the reminiscences of their friends and acquaintances.

Her point of view? It's more or less identical with Griffith's Birth of a Nation, released nine years later. Lincoln is a martyred saint, the northerners are basically well-meaning folk misled by radical demagogues, who in the end must come round to siding with their fellow whites in the South; blacks are divisible between lovable old servants and scary, uppity dupes who need a firm hand to be restored to their proper (subordinate) position in life; the original Klan was an unfortunate but necessary social corrective, and so on. Avary and Griffith even share specific motifs (blacks shoving whites off sidewalks, imperiled virgins, etc.) and are presumably drawing on similar sources (Griffith's movie was based on a 1905 novel by Thomas Dixon, but I can't say where that fits in with the transmission of ideas since I haven't read it).

Despite his racism, Griffith was unmistakably a Progressive; Avary's politics are harder to pin down. She is necessarily patriotic about the Spanish-American War, but quietly comments that she hopes the US is not causing harm to innocent Filipinos, as it did to innocent Southerners. It's also interesting that she devotes an entire chapter to the subject of wartime and postwar rape. Incredibly enough, this is still a largely unexplored subject despite the vast amount of verbiage written about the Civil War era. So, if her racism appalls, there is a little comfort to be had in hints of proto-feminism.

[NDH · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of this stuff actually happened; some of it is actually “true.” This book reminds me of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

What’s certain, in any case, is that people read these stories, and told each other these stories, and they—including that “saintly” Progressive Democrat, Woodrow Wilson— believed them to be true. And many of them were, in fact, horrifically and abominably True.
Sadly, however, the rest is history, in all its tragic wretchedness.

Swirling the fogs of war and the mists of time and selective memory, Myrta Lockett Avary wrote what her readers wanted to read; that they were, and still are, the noble heroes of the stories they told themselves about themselves. The consequences, of course, were unimaginable. Were they avoidable? Probably only if the war itself had been avoided.

Harriet Beecher Stowe should understand.

All that said, Chapter 30 (The Battle for the State House) describing the situation in South Carolina after the election of 1876 stands as proof of the utter failure of Radical Republican policies and of the corrupt governance that led to it. Things didn’t have to be that way.

In any case, and despite my criticisms of her, I’m willing to give Avary a pass, so to speak, on account of her role in bringing to light the diary/memoirs of Mary Boykin Chesnut. That’s one good thing she did.

It was a confusing, complicated, fascinating time. So is this book.