A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction

At the end of A Man of Bad Reputation, Drew Swanson breaks through the fourth wall to inform the reader of his “personal assessment” of North Carolina state senator John Walter Stephens, who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1870. Swanson sees Stephens as ultimately “on the right side of history” yet as flawed as the rest of us, a conclusion he reached after ten years of trying to puzzle out Stephens's character. After 150 taut pages in which Swanson wades through the shocking confessions, petty accusations, “scurrilous gossip,” and carefully crafted propaganda that surrounded Stephens, it is easy to see how dividing the man from the myths is tricky (59). “Who Stephens was and why he was killed,” Swanson tells us, “proved malleable in public memory. He alternately fit the role of heel and martyr” (3).Stephens's life, murder, and afterlife are worthy of study for many reasons that Swanson adeptly juggles over the course of his nonfiction novella. First, Stephens's murder existed as part of a “chain of events” that led to North Carolina governor William Woods Holden's impeachment and the gradual installation of a white supremacist regime in the state (3). Second, Stephens's murder and the stories swirling around it illustrate the role of memory-making in Reconstruction (this is well-trod ground historiographically, but relevant to Swanson's tale). Third, Stephens's murder demonstrates why place matters. Stephens was from Caswell County, a rural community reliant on and with a built environment formed by tobacco cultivation. Personal grievances, changing economic fortunes, and local political jockeying all arose in the specific rural and agricultural context of the sparsely populated county.Swanson's attention to the environment is keenest in chapter 1, “Promise.” There he surveys the long history of settlement in the land that became Caswell County and dwells on the introduction of tobacco, especially bright-leaf tobacco in the late antebellum era, which permanently altered the landscape, fortunes, and lives of the county's residents both Black and white. The Civil War liberated many of the county's residents, disappointed the hopes of others, and made way for “turmoil” that “created opportunities” (23).At that juncture, in chapter 2, “Perdition,” Stephens arrives as an opportunist. His early life was unremarkable. He grew up “on the margins of the plantation economy,” never served in the Confederate army, and made a short-lived foray into Democratic politics. By 1867, he had joined the Union League, befriended Albion Tourgée, and was a Republican. He rapidly climbed the ranks of state politics as a justice of the peace, served as a county agent for the Freedman's Bureau, ran a fraught but ultimately victorious campaign for a state senate seat in 1868, and became a detective for Governor Holden in unearthing Klan activities. Swanson keeps a close eye on Stephens's personal relationships with friends, enemies, and uneasy allies through chapter 3, “Pyrrhic Victories”; as racial and political tensions grew hot in 1869 and 1870, so too did public rhetoric around Stephens intensify.Stephens's life ended in the basement of the Caswell County courthouse. He was strangled and stabbed in the old Freedman's Bureau office while a raucous Conservative political meeting rattled the ceiling. But, as Swanson shows in chapters 4, 5, and 6, Stephens's afterlife was maybe even more consequential. He charts not only the course of major political events like Holden's impeachment and the Democratic overthrow of the state's Reconstruction government, but also the authoring of numerous textbooks, monographs, and novels that used Stephens's political career, personal life, and murder for ideological ends. Even three confessions in 1876, 1891, and 1919 to his murder by men suspected of the act at the time had little impact on the public discourse around Stephens, which was by then controlled by Lost Causers.Swanson points to some meaningful change over time; at least academic historians over the last few decades have heeded W. E. B. Du Bois's call and given Reconstruction its proper due. But what to make of Stephens? Swanson does not view favorably how his contemporaries have depicted Stephens, who have relegated him to the rather flat role of martyr. And although no definitive picture of Stephens emerges—a feat that Swanson doubts can be accomplished—Swanson does fine work revealing the complexity of Stephens's political, environmental, and economic context, and he provides the reader with an impression of who the man may have been. He ends the book with a personal anecdote in which he is outside the Caswell County courthouse, soaked in rain, empty-handed after a final, unsuccessful attempt to gain some clarity on an episode of Stephens's life involving dead chickens. Sometimes it is indeed unclear as to what has truly changed and what we as historians can profoundly know.Swanson suggests that Stephens's sins were venal rather than mortal. To that end, it seems to me that a more virtuous life would not likely have saved Stephens from the Klansmen who served as judge, jury, and executioner. Stephens was a threat to the political, economic, and racial regime the Klan wanted: that is what really mattered to his killers. They only cared about Stephens's character insofar as it gave them fodder to slander Stephens, to lie about what they had done for decades, and to construe their crime as a favor to white North Carolinians at the expense of the rights and lives of Black North Carolinians. Swanson's frequent appeals to the complexity and unknowability of Reconstruction-era Caswell County notwithstanding, that is clear.