Book Review: A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction
A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction. Drew A Swanson. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Paperback, 220 pp. $24.95.
Reviewed by Michael C. Hardy
There are certain stories about history that grab the attention of the public. One of those events is certainly the death of John W. Stephens in the Caswell County, North Carolina, courthouse in 1870, igniting the Kirk-Holden War. Born in Guilford County in 1834, Swanson grew up in Rockingham County and somehow evaded service in the Confederate military, working for the Confederate government instead. After the war ended, he moved with his second wife to Caswell County, dealt in tobacco, worked as an agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau, and joined the Republican Party. Stephens was elected to the North Carolina Senate in 1868.
The late 1860s in North Carolina was a time fraught with violence and ruin. Stephens was accused of being a spy for Gov. William Woods Holden (he was), and leading local Union League members in targeting the barns and homesteads of local conservatives. His known ties to the Republican administration won him few Conservative friends in Caswell County. His actions became so odious that local vigilantes targeted Stephens, lured him into the basement of the courthouse in Yanceyville, and murdered him. There were several local men arrested, but none went to trial. It was not until decades later, and at different times, that three different men confessed to the crime, detailing the involvement of the local Ku Klux Klan. The murder of Stephens, and later Wyatt Outlaw, the Kirk-Holden War, and the impeachment of Holden, are often used as illustrations of Southern resistance to Republican rule during the Reconstruction years.
In A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction. Drew A. Swanson dives not only into the story of Stephens, exploring his early life and postwar misfortune, but also the people and places involved in that tragic day.
Caswell County was one of the leaders of the tobacco boom in the mid-nineteenth century. Tobacco was a labor-intensive cash crop that required many hands. Much of that labor pre-war involved slave labor. Many of those slaves continued to work in the fields as freedmen following the war. Stephen’s involvement as an agent in the Freedman’s Bureau after the war was brought into question, and he was threatened with arrest if he did not stop collecting fees for his work. Swanson examines Stephen’s controversial election to the state senate (53) and his role as a detective for Governor Holden. Stephens allegedly was paid $150 for 1869 in this role, plus $272 worth of expenses, and then tried to cajole more money from Holden (59-60). Swanson also examines the story of each of the three men who made later-in-life confessions of killing Stephens. He notes that parts of their stories do not coincide and spends a great deal of time on John G. Lea’s account. Lea provided his narrative to the North Carolina Historical Commission in July 1919, but it was not released until his death in 1935. Swanson also looks at how Stephens’s death has been portrayed by historians, both the Dunning School and Foner School, over the past 100 years.
There have been various treatments of the death of John Stephens over the past 100 years, both by local and academic historians. Swanson’s A Man of Bad Reputation adds to this historiography. He examines the facts and explores period newspapers, the trial transcripts of Holden’s impeachment, and what others have written about the sensational events surrounding the death of Stephens. Swanson’s greatest contribution might just be his examination not of the story itself, but in the way that other historians have interpreted those events.
