The Store is a 1932 novel by Thomas Sigismund Stribling. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1933. It is the second book of the Vaiden trilogy, comprising The Forge, The Store, and Unfinished Cathedral. [1] All three books in the trilogy have been kept in print since the mid-1980s by the University of Alabama Press. [2] [3] [4]
The first book in the trilogy, The Forge, opens at the beginning of the American Civil War and ends with the abolition of slavery. Continuing the exploration of the transformation of the American South from its traditional agrarian society to a new economic and social order, The Store follows the return from war of Miltiades "Milt" Vaiden. Before the war he had been overseer on a major plantation, and he struggles to find a place for himself under new free labor conditions. The novel depicts how wealthy white planters and yeomen farmers, and newly freed African Americans attempt to adapt to life in the post-War South.
Colonel Miltiades "Milt" Vaiden, a decorated Civil War Confederate officer and former overseer of Crowninshield plantation, is the central figure in this and the third novel of the trilogy. As an overseer he was in a position between the wealthy planters and poor whites; his father was a blacksmith. Struggling to gain a place after the war, he became head of the newly founded local Ku Klux Klan (KKK), made up of veterans determined to defend white supremacy. A character described by critic J. Donald Adams in the New York Times as "forceful" and "unscrupulous", Col. Milt Vaiden slowly works his way into business leadership in the town of Florence by the late 1880s, in the post-Reconstruction era. [5]
Stribling explores the personal and economic trials and tribulations of Col. Milt and others during the post-Reconstruction era, when the labor force of freedmen has been converted mostly to sharecroppers and tenant farmers. White men work to exploit the changing conditions. The title is symbolic of Col. Milt's ethical and economic transition from post-war poverty to economic independence, set against the "old plantation" culture. The novel describes in blunt language the cultural and social stress as the old plantation society and freedmen adjust to the post-war reconstruction.
Robert Coates of the New Yorker magazine compared T.S. Stribling "to Mark Twain in his abilities to convey the very life and movement of a small Southern town." [6]
The Literary Guild selected this novel in 1932 for one of its editions, which helped to stimulate its sales.
The following year, Stribling won a 1933 Pulitzer Prize for this novel. The Pulitzer committee said it had selected it because "of its sustained interest, and because of the convincing and comprehensive picture it presents of life in an inland Southern community during the middle eighties of the last century." [6]
The Reconstruction era was a period in United States history following the American Civil War, dominated by the legal, social, and political challenges of abolishing slavery and reintegrating the former Confederate States of America into the United States. During this period, three amendments were added to the United States Constitution to grant equal civil rights to the newly freed slaves. Despite this, former Confederate states often used poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation to control people of color.
Clifton is a city in Wayne County, Tennessee, on the state's south central border with Alabama. It developed as a river port along the Tennessee River in the 19th century. Its historic districts listed on the National Register of Historic Places are associated with this period. The population was 2,694 at the 2010 census.
James Lusk Alcorn was a governor, and U.S. senator during the Reconstruction era in Mississippi. A Moderate Republican and Whiggish "scalawag", he engaged in a bitter rivalry with Radical Republican Adelbert Ames, who defeated him in the 1873 gubernatorial race. Alcorn was the first elected Republican governor of Mississippi.
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, usually referred to as simply the Freedmen's Bureau, was a U.S. government agency of early post American Civil War Reconstruction, assisting freedmen in the South. It was established on March 3, 1865, and operated briefly as a federal agency after the War, from 1865 to 1872, to direct "provisions, clothing, and fuel...for the immediate and temporary shelter and supply of destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen and their wives and children".
In United States history, the pejorative scalawag referred to white Southerners who supported Reconstruction policies and efforts after the conclusion of the American Civil War.
Forty acres and a mule was part of Special Field Orders No. 15, a wartime order proclaimed by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman on January 16, 1865, during the American Civil War, to allot land to some freed families, in plots of land no larger than 40 acres (16 ha). Sherman later ordered the army to lend mules for the agrarian reform effort. The field orders followed a series of conversations between Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Radical Republican abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens following disruptions to the institution of slavery provoked by the American Civil War. Many freed people believed, after being told by various political figures, that they had a right to own the land they had been forced to work as slaves and were eager to control their own property. Freed people widely expected to legally claim 40 acres of land. However, Abraham Lincoln's successor as president, Andrew Johnson, tried to reverse the intent of Sherman's wartime Order No. 15 and similar provisions included in the second Freedmen's Bureau bills.
Robert Miller Patton was an American politician who served as the 20th governor of the Alabama from 1865 to 1868.
The Black Codes, sometimes called the Black Laws, were laws which governed the conduct of African Americans. In 1832, James Kent wrote that "in most of the United States, there is a distinction in respect to political privileges, between free white persons and free colored persons of African blood; and in no part of the country do the latter, in point of fact, participate equally with the whites, in the exercise of civil and political rights." Although Black Codes existed before the Civil War and although many Northern states had them, the Southern U.S. states codified such laws in everyday practice. The best known of these laws were passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866, after the Civil War, in order to restrict African Americans' freedom, and in order to compel them to work for either low or no wages.
Established in 1994, the Cane River Creole National Historical Park serves to preserve the resources and cultural landscapes of the Cane River region in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. Located along the Cane River Lake, the park is approximately 63 acres and includes two French Creole cotton plantations, Oakland and Magnolia. Both plantations are complete in their historic settings, including landscapes, outbuildings, structures, furnishings, and artifacts; and they are the most intact French Creole cotton plantations in the United States. In total, 65 historic structures and over a million artifacts enhance the National Park Service mission as it strives to tell the story of the evolution of plantation agriculture through the perspective of the land owners, enslaved workers, overseers, skilled workers, and tenant farmers who resided along the Cane River for over two hundred years. This park is included as a site on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
The history of the state of Mississippi extends back to thousands of years of indigenous peoples. Evidence of their cultures has been found largely through archeological excavations, as well as existing remains of earthwork mounds built thousands of years ago. Native American traditions were kept through oral histories; with Europeans recording the accounts of historic peoples they encountered. Since the late 20th century, there have been increased studies of the Native American tribes and reliance on their oral histories to document their cultures. Their accounts have been correlated with evidence of natural events.
Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 is a history of the Reconstruction era by W. E. B. Du Bois, first published in 1935. The book challenged the standard academic view of Reconstruction at the time, the Dunning School, which contended that the period was a failure and downplayed the contributions of African Americans. Du Bois instead emphasized the agency of Black people and freed slaves during the Civil War and Reconstruction and framed the period as one that held promise for a worker-ruled democracy to replace a slavery-based plantation economy.
Thomas Sigismund Stribling was an American writer. Although he passed the bar and practiced law for a few years, he quickly began to focus on writing. First known for adventure stories published in pulp fiction magazines, he enlarged his reach with novels of social satire set in Middle Tennessee and other parts of the South. His best-known work is the Vaiden trilogy, set in Florence, Alabama. The first volume is The Forge (1931). He won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1933 for the second novel of this series, The Store. The last, set in the 1920s, is The Unfinished Cathedral (1934). Both the second and third novels were chosen as selections by the Literary Guild.
William Archibald Dunning was an American historian and political scientist at Columbia University noted for his work on the Reconstruction era of the United States. He founded the informal Dunning School of interpreting the Reconstruction era through his own writings and the Ph.D. dissertations of his numerous students. Dunning has been criticized for advocating white supremacist interpretations, his "blatant use of the discipline of history for reactionary ends" and for offering "scholarly legitimacy to the disenfranchisement of southern blacks and to the Jim Crow system."
In the United States, a freedmen's town was an African American municipality or community built by freedmen, formerly enslaved people who were emancipated during and after the American Civil War. These towns emerged in a number of states, most notably Texas. They are also known as freedom colonies, from the title of a book by Sitton and Conrad.
Walter Lynwood Fleming (1874–1932) was an American historian of the South and Reconstruction. He was a leader of the Dunning School of scholars in the early 20th century, who addressed Reconstruction era history using historiographical technique. He was a professor at Vanderbilt University from 1917 through his career, also serving as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, and Director of the Graduate School. A prolific writer, he published ten books and 166 articles and reviews. The son of a plantation owner who had slaves, Fleming was sympathetic to White supremacist arguments and Democratic Party positions of his era while critical of Republicans and Reconstruction.
This is a selected bibliography of the main scholarly books and articles of Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, 1863–1877.
Faunsdale Plantation is a historic slave plantation near the town of Faunsdale, Alabama, United States. This plantation is in the Black Belt, a section of the state developed for cotton plantations. Until the U.S. Civil War, planters held as many as 186 enslaved African Americans as laborers to raise cotton as a commodity crop.
Plantation complexes were common on agricultural plantations in the Southern United States from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Until the abolition of slavery, such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.
Joseph Emory Davis was an American lawyer who became one of the wealthiest planters in Mississippi in the antebellum era; he owned thousands of acres of land and was among the nine men in Mississippi who owned more than 300 slaves. He was the elder brother of Jefferson Davis and acted as his surrogate father for several years. The younger Davis became a politician, U.S. Senator, and later President of the Confederacy.
The Black Belt in the American South refers to the social history, especially concerning slavery and black workers, of the geological region known as the Black Belt. The geology emphasizes the highly fertile black soil. Historically, the black belt economy was based on cotton plantations – along with some tobacco plantation areas along the Virginia-North Carolina border. The valuable land was largely controlled by rich whites, and worked by very poor, primarily black slaves who in many counties constituted a majority of the population. Generally the term is applied to a larger region than that defined by its geology.