In this groundbreaking study, Kent Redding examines the fluid political landscape of the nineteenth-century South, revealing the complex interplay between the elite’s manipulation of political and racial identity and the innovative mobilizing strategies marginalized groups adopted in order to combat disfranchisement.   Far from being a low-level, localized trend, the struggle for power in North Carolina would be felt across the entire country as race-and class-based organizing challenged the dominant models of making and holding power.   Redding reveals how the ruling class operates with motivations and methods very similar to those of the black voters and Populist farmers they fought against. He tracks how the elites co-opted the innovative mobilizing strategies of the subaltern groups to effectively use their own weapons against them.   At the core of Making Race, Making Power is an insightful dissection of the concrete connections between political strategies of solidarity and exclusion and underlying patterns of race relations.   "Redding's study is a truly novel and deeply significant contribution to both Southern history and political sociology. His insightful analysis and painstaking research create the kind of good book that results from posing completely fresh questions to seemingly familiar terrain." Making Race, Making Power North Carolina's Road to Disfranchisement By KENT REDDING UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS Copyright © 2003 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-252-02808-3 Contents Acknowledgments............................................................ixIntroduction...............................................................11. The Structuring of Southern Voter Turnout...............................172. North Carolina Democratic Politics and Society in the 1880s: Democratic Control through Localism...................................................313. Making and Blocking Republican Power...................................584. The Demise of Democratic Localism and the Rise of Populism..............745. The Failed Alternatives to Democratic Rule: Movement-Party Disjunctions in Populism................................................................936. Democrats Transformed, Democracy Undone.................................112Conclusion.................................................................135Notes......................................................................139Bibliography...............................................................165Index......................................................................177 CHAPTER 1 The Structuring of SouthernVoter Turnout This chapter attempts to gauge the basic parameters of the franchise in theSouth by analyzing southern voter turnout between 1880, prior to most disfranchisementregulation, and 1912, after basic forms of disfranchisement hadbeen implemented in every southern state. As I examine patterns of votingas turnout declined from nearly 65 percent to less than 30 percent, I will belooking for the trace of disfranchisement to set the broader context for in-depthanalyses of the actual struggles that brought about disfranchisementin North Carolina. Racial division is a key part of the story, but here racial division is analyzedwithin the context of a broader process of political restructuring. Battles oversuffrage expansion and restriction provide an excellent vantage point fromwhich to study the process by which patterns of voting participation are producedout of political conflict. Once set, these patterns are often very difficultto change and thus have long-term consequences. In the South, the structureserected during the 1890s lasted nearly seventy years, with enormousconsequences for both the South and the nation. This chapter begins to account for the generation of these patterns througha dynamic analysis of their bases. The analysis looks at the political and socioeconomicdeterminants of voter turnout in the South for four electionsacross four decades. I test four propositions concerning voter turnout andfind some support for all four. I use this analysis to develop a broader explanationfor voter turnout based on the dynamic structuring of politics. Notes on U.S. and Southern Electoral History In general, the nineteenth century is notable for the progressive expansionof suffrage in the United States. By midcentury, all U.S. states had eliminatedproperty qualifications for voting, and throughout the century Americanlaws governing voting were among the least restrictive in the world. The FifteenthAmendment to the Constitution, passed in 1870, expanded suffrageeven further by barring states from abridging the right to vote "on accountof race, color, or previous condition of servitude." National Politics In spite of these reform efforts, the nineteenth century is marked by strongdiscontinuities. The Civil War deconstructed America