返回Google圖書搜尋

The Limits of Southern Dissent

其他書名	The Lives of Kenneth and John B. Rayner
出版	Texas A & M University, 1988
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=sMOwOgAACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Historians have long recognized that nineteenth-century southern politics was characterized by conformity and consensus, largely due to the perceived need to maintain white supremacy. They have also recognized that within the South there existed a minority of leaders who dissented from the prevailing view. This is the biography of two such men. North Carolina planter Kenneth Rayner (1808-1884) served in his state's 1835 constitutional convention and for twenty years sat in the state legislature and in Congress as a Whig. In 1854 he became a major leader of the American, or Know-Nothing, party. He authored the party's Union Degree, an oath which pledged Know-Nothings to fight sectionalism. In 1861 he served in North Carolina's secession convention as a secessionist, but in 1864 he secretly jointed the state's peace movement. After the war he authored the Life and Time of Andrew Johnson. A Mississippi planting venture failed in 1868, and Rayner later served in the Grant administration as judge of the Alabama Claims Court and Solicitor of the Treasury. John B. Rayner (1850-1918) was born to a slave mother in Raleigh. He was raised at the Rayner home and openly acknowledged as Kenneth Rayner's son. After the war he attended college in Raleigh before moving the Tarboro in about 1872, where he held several local political offices as a Republican during Reconstruction. In 1880 he led a migration of black farmworkers to Robertson County, Texas. Settling in Calvert, he preached, taught school, and participated in Republican politics. Rayner gained notoriety as a prohibitionist in the 1887 state prohibition campaign and in 1892 joined the newly-founded People's party. By 1894 he had risen to a position as the leading black Populist in Texas and was elected to the party's state executive committee. He remained active in the Populist movement until 1898. After the turn of the century he served as chief fundraiser for two black colleges. Rayner also worked as a paid political organizer for the Texas Brewers' Association in the anti-prohibition cause and declared himself an independent in party politics. He died in 1918.