Participation Type
Paper
Session Title
Session 5.03 Civil War
Presentation #1 Title
A Turning Point in Appalachian Reconstruction: A New Look at the Asheville Election Day Riot of 1868
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
It has been 21 years since Eric Olson published his account of the 1868 election riot in Asheville, North Carolina. A product of the Sixth Annual Appalachian Studies Conference, Olson’s account has stood for two decades as the standard academic depiction of the riot. Yet Olson’s version of events on that fateful day in November is incomplete. He relied largely on local historians, who themselves played a role in masking the political nature of the violence, and newspapers. His use of the federal investigation into southern Ku Klux Klan violence only scratched the surface of what happened on election day in November 1868. A microhistory of the Asheville election riot reveals the full complexity of Reconstruction in an Southern Appalachian community. The riot was entirely political as Conservative-Democrats turned their guns on a biracial mountain Republican coalition in an effort to stem the latter group’s political momentum. The violence was dismissed as a personal conflict between African Americans, which hid the political nature of the violence. However, new evidence shatters that interpretation. Asheville erupted in violence due to the rising strength of the Ku Klux Klan, the influence of federal power in the form of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and elite whites’ animosity toward western North Carolina’s Unionist minority. The Asheville election riot of 1868 was a major turning point in the region’s Reconstruction era history. In this one event, scholars can lay bare a deeper understanding of Appalachian violence, race relations, and post-Civil War politics.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Steven Nash is an assistant professor of history at East Tennessee State University. He is currently completing a book on Reconstruction in western North Carolina.
A Turning Point in Appalachian Reconstruction: A New Look at the Asheville Election Day Riot of 1868
It has been 21 years since Eric Olson published his account of the 1868 election riot in Asheville, North Carolina. A product of the Sixth Annual Appalachian Studies Conference, Olson’s account has stood for two decades as the standard academic depiction of the riot. Yet Olson’s version of events on that fateful day in November is incomplete. He relied largely on local historians, who themselves played a role in masking the political nature of the violence, and newspapers. His use of the federal investigation into southern Ku Klux Klan violence only scratched the surface of what happened on election day in November 1868. A microhistory of the Asheville election riot reveals the full complexity of Reconstruction in an Southern Appalachian community. The riot was entirely political as Conservative-Democrats turned their guns on a biracial mountain Republican coalition in an effort to stem the latter group’s political momentum. The violence was dismissed as a personal conflict between African Americans, which hid the political nature of the violence. However, new evidence shatters that interpretation. Asheville erupted in violence due to the rising strength of the Ku Klux Klan, the influence of federal power in the form of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and elite whites’ animosity toward western North Carolina’s Unionist minority. The Asheville election riot of 1868 was a major turning point in the region’s Reconstruction era history. In this one event, scholars can lay bare a deeper understanding of Appalachian violence, race relations, and post-Civil War politics.
