During the post-Civil War “Reconstruction” of the defeated Southern states, Democrats referred to local Whites who had become Republicans as “scalawags.”[1] One such was John W. Stephens (1834-1870) of North Carolina.[2] Stephens had grown up in difficult circumstances[3] and with none of the advantages enjoyed by the middle and upper ranks of Southern society. He spent some time hawking religious tracts, then found work as a tobacco trader in South Carolina. Along the way he became a husband, father, and widower with a young child in his care, then once again a husband and father. He was back in North Carolina when the war began. With two young children to support, he did not join the rush to the colors. He spent the war commandeering horses for the army; then worked as an “impressment agent” collecting draftees. By 1865, there were probably many people in the area who thought ill of Stephens.
After the war, Stephens went back to tobacco trading. However, tumultuous change filled the post-war years. The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery (1865); the Reconstruction Acts imposing federal controls on former rebel states (1867); the Fourteenth Amendment, granting full citizenship to the freed people (1867); and the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing the right to vote (1869), fell as hammer blows on Southern White beliefs. Democrats responded by organizing the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to roll back Black voting rights and the Republican party. Many murders occurred in the Piedmont area.
Stephens cast his lot with the new order. He joined the Republican party and the Union League,[4] then got a job with the Freedmen’s Bureau. He worked at organizing the freedmen to vote Republican and gained a reputation as a barn-burner.[5] This turned him from a much disliked figure of ridicule and into an outright enemy of most Whites. Like other White Republicans, Stephens suffered ostracism and threats, and went everywhere armed.
In 1868 the freedmen he had been organizing elected him to the North Carolina state Senate. That election was contested: the Democrats claimed that their candidate had been elected, while the Republican-dominated state Senate gave the seat to Stephens. In all this he formed a part of the political machine assembled by Republican Governor William Holden.[6]
In May 1870, Stephens–foolishly or provocatively–attended a Democratic nominating meeting in his home county. Lured away by one of the members, Stephens was isolated, over-powered, and murdered. Governor Holden responded by putting two counties under martial law and sending in reliable militia. While a host of arrests followed, convictions did not. Juries would not convict, judges directed trials. Holden himself was impeached. Power shifted more and more to Democrats, who eventually went on to impose White supremacy.
The life and death of Stephens illuminate the reasons for an incomplete Reconstruction.
[1] Scalawag – Wikipedia casts at least some light on the origin of the epithet.
[2] Drew A. Swanson, A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction (2023).
[3] His father was a tailor with five children who died in 1848.
[4] Essentially an arm of the Republica party. There’s an academic study: Michael W. Fitzgerald, The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change During Reconstruction (1989).
[5] Not a reference to his political oratory. He was believed to be organizing the nighttime burning of the barns of former Confederates. See: the short story by William Faulkner, “Barn Burning” (1939).
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