Victoria Bynum's The Long Shadow of the Civil War traces the “legacies of the American Civil War” by examining Southerners who resisted the Confederate government (xi). The book confronts two longstanding historiographical questions. First, historians have debated the degree of support among Southerners to the Confederate cause. Gary Gallagher, arguing for strong popular support, points out in The Confederate War (Harvard University Press, 1997) that approximately seventy-five to eighty-five percent of available white males in the Confederacy were placed under arms and fought a lengthy, brutal, and costly war (28–36). Bynum sees significant dissatisfaction in the populace. Second, historians have asked whether the South in the nineteenth century experienced more continuity or discontinuity as a result of the Civil War. Bynum finds ideological continuity in the nineteenth-century South from “Southern Unionists who evolved into New South populists and socialists” (xi). These concerns, along with questions of race, class, and gender, shape the book.

Building on her earlier work, The Free State of Jones, Bynum examines and links anti-Confederate guerilla bands in the “Quaker Belt” of central North Carolina and the “Big Thicket” of East Texas to the more famous Knight's Company in Jones County, Mississippi. Using family histories, Bynum demonstrates that the three areas were joined through migration patterns, kinship ties, and economic marginality. Many early settlers in Jones County came from North Carolina. A number of the guerillas in East Texas had migrated from Mississippi and were related to individuals in Knight's Company. Bynum calls the Quaker belt the “ancestral home” of the guerillas in Mississippi and Texas, suggesting that the dissenting religious culture, significant non-slaveholding population, persistent Unionism, and antislavery traditions of central North Carolina provided an intellectual patrimony to guerillas further west (28). While it is intriguing, the facts do not always support this view. Bynum mentions, for example, that the father of the guerilla leader Warren Collins in East Texas migrated to Mississippi from South Carolina (24). She also admits that “wartime divisions,” which resulted in guerilla activity, “were not always drawn cleanly along lines of slaveholding status” (30). Still, the cultural linkages among the three areas are fascinating and beg for further study and analysis.

In chapters 2 and 3, Bynum attempts to find ideological justifications for the resistance of whites to the Confederate government in North Carolina. She presents conflicting evidence. On the one hand, she points out that the Quaker Belt had a “non-slaveholding landed majority” and a heritage of religious dissent (42). She asserts that during the war these people “resisted with arms the authority of what they considered to be a lawless government created in defiance of the will of the people” (46). On the other hand, Bynum admits that the “obvious cause” of the social disorder in the Quaker Belt during the war was “abject poverty” (51). When agents of the Confederate government hunted down deserters from the army or confiscated food stuffs and farm animals, poor women resisted and complained. In addition, Bynum notes that stealing was a “common activity among deserters,” another reason for social strife in the area (44). Declining material conditions, rather than political ideology, seemed to trigger protests. After the war, white supremacists in North Carolina tried to keep blacks subservient to whites. Bynum relates court cases in which black women who bore the illegitimate children of white fathers tried, and failed, to receive support for their mixed-race children.

Bynum returns to Mississippi and Texas for the remainder of the book. Chapter 4 relates Newt Knight's unsuccessful attempt to obtain a settlement from the federal government for his guerilla activities as leader of Knight's Company during the war. Bynum demonstrates an impressive, intricate knowledge of the case. Knight tried to establish his consistent Unionism to secure his claim to federal funds, but his case was marred by incompetent lawyers, politics, faulty memories, and unsubstantiated assertions. Chapter 5 also examines ideological continuity by tracing the postwar careers of some of the guerillas. Bynum finds that some, such as Warren Collins, became Populists and Socialists. Others found escape in unconventional religious groups such as the Mormons or Unitarians. A number of men who had participated in Knight's Company left Mississippi, perhaps to escape the “reconstituted order over which the Democratic Party reigned supreme” (105). Bynum's evidence is compelling. Many, but not all, of the participants in the guerilla movements remained lifelong “dissenters” from the status quo.

The last chapter relates the incredibly complex history of the multiracial families of Newt Knight. Knight married a white woman, Selena, and had several children. A philanderer, Knight later lived with a black woman, Rachel, who had been a slave of his grandfather, and had children by her (122). Rachel also had other children, Bynum tells us, “by a white man” (11). Selena left her husband, but two of her children by Newt married two of Rachel's mixed-race children by an unnamed father. Matt, Newt and Selena's son, and Fannie, Rachel's daughter, had eight children together before Matt abandoned his family and began living with a white female cousin (123–24). Bynum insists that “sexual exploitation of enslaved women, a white male prerogative exercised throughout the antebellum South, had contributed to a large population of light-skinned African Americans” (55). Were Rachel's mixed-race children by an unnamed father somehow related to Newt Knight? Not surprisingly, many of the Knight descendants downplayed, ignored, or forgot their complex heritage. Bynum notes that a number of them moved out of Mississippi and lived as whites, explaining away their darker complexions by claiming Indian descent (122–23). Others joined the Seventh Day Adventists to find meaning. Others continued to live in Mississippi. Besides their obvious differences from white middle-class society, the broader meaning of the story of this family seems unclear.

Bynum's epilogue details the ways in which the Knight Company has been misremembered since the Civil War. She believes that the group presented an alternative legacy of the Civil War. Her story demonstrates that the South was not a solid union of Confederate nationalists. The Confederate home front was a divisive place where guerilla activity weakened the war effort. The Lost Cause mythology failed to incorporate the complexity of the Civil War South. Bynum confirms the analysis offered, for example, by William Freehling's The South vs. the South (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Bynum knows her sources well and demonstrates in several cases the continuity of intellectual and political dissent from the Southern status quo. The complex family trees of the groups she discusses could have been included in charts to help the reader. The book is an interesting read and opens up avenues for scholars who wish to trace kinship migrations throughout the South and the cultural linkages those migrations may have established.