Booknotes: Unreconstructed

New Arrival:

• Unreconstructed: Slavery and Emancipation on Louisiana's Red River, 1820–1880 by Carin Peller-Semmens (LSU Press, 2025).

With a geographical focus on Louisiana's Red River Valley before, during, and after the Civil War, Unreconstructed centers its attention upon "the constancy of racial subjugation in one of the most violent areas of the South."

The first two chapters of historian Carin Peller-Semmens's study explore the region's high suitability for cotton growing and subsequent antebellum period expansion of plantation agriculture and slavery.

Though the volume is more strongly categorized as Southern History, a pair of chapters address the events of secession and the Civil War years. The impact of emancipation and the heavy presence of Union forces in the region from the mid-war period onward (in particular during the 1864 Red River Campaign) are explored.

The creation and decades-long maintenance of a "durable ideology of mastery" is the binding theme of the book. Peller-Semmens describes post-war political and vigilante violence in the Red River region as "slaveholding recloaked," and those actions, examined in the final chapters, "became effective, calibrated tools of political, social, and economic control during Reconstruction." In the author's view, the white population's "ideology of mastery transcended class, creating a shared ethos steeped in racist behavior that remained crucial to postwar conceptions of white selfhood." The result was a "campaign of persistent violence that chipped away at freedpeople’s experience of freedom" and produced "seismic incidents of racial violence" at Colfax in 1873 (Chapter Six) and Coushatta in 1874 (Chapter Seven).