Southern Scoundrels

Jeff Forret is professor of history and Distinguished Faculty Research Fellow at Lamar University. His books include Williams' Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts and Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South, winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Bruce E. Baker is reader in American history at Newcastle University. He has published widely on topics related to southern history, including lynching, Reconstruction, historical memory, New Orleans, the cotton trade, and crime.

Introduction, Jeff Forret and Bruce E. Baker ""Preachers and Peddlers: Credit and Belief in the Flush Times,"" John Lindbeck ""A Gentleman and a Scoundrel? Alexander McDonald, Financial Reputation, and Slavery's Capitalism,"" Alexandra J. Finley ""'How Deeply They Weed into the Pockets': Slave Traders, Bank Speculators, and the Anatomy of a Chesapeake Wildcat, 1840OCo1843,"" Jeff Forret ""Bernard Kendig: Orchestrating Fraud in the Market and the Courtroom,"" Maria R. Montalvo ""William A. Britton v. Benjamin F. Butler: Occupied New Orleans, Confiscation, and the Disruption of the Cotton Trade in Wartime Natchez,"" Jeff Strickland ""Devils at the Doorstep: Confederate Judges, Masters of Sequestration,"" Rodney J. Steward ""'Irresistibly Impelled toward Illegal Appropriation': The Civil War Schemes of William G. Cheeney,"" Jimmy L. Bryan, Jr. ""Das Kapital on Tchoupitoulas Street: The Marketing of Stolen Goods and the Reserve Army of Labor in Reconstruction-Era New Orleans,"" Bruce E. Baker ""The Violent Lives of William Faucett,"" Elaine S. Frantz ""Eureka! Law and Order for Sale in Gilded Age Appalachia,"" T. R. C. Hutton

Come to these absorbing essays for their rip-roaring tales of fraud, but stay for the persuasive case they make: every market transaction in the nineteenth-century South involved people trying to buy cheap, sell dear, compete relentlessly, litigate successfully, and leave the other guy holding the bag. That was capitalism, and these scoundrels were good at it.--Brian P. Luskey, author of "Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America" Counterfeiters, horse thieves, Confederate judges, slave traders, swindlers, mountain detectives, speculators, and preachers, oh my! These essays show how unethical, unscrupulous and even illegal activities thrived in the unregulated nineteenth-century economy. More than just enjoyable, but peculiar stories, the narratives highlight vital features in the complex development of Southern capitalism.--Joshua R. Greenberg, author of "Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic" Here is the seamy underside of the 19th-century South told through its grifters, scrappers, lockpickers, embezzlers, bought judges, wildcat bankers, slave traders, bounty hunters, and ladies prepared to lie under oath. They were products of a world built on slavery and yet their grifts flourished even in the decades after slavery collapsed. As this volume shows, these liars' practices turned other people's sweat into private equity, practices of appropriation at the heart of American capitalism.--Scott Reynolds Nelson, author of "A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters" Too often ignored as peripheral or relegated to the realm of lore, the scoundrels and grifters highlighted in this volume reveal the centrality of informal networks to the southern economy. This is a delightful set of essays sure to provoke and enlighten.--Kathleen M. Hilliard, author of "Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power's Purchase in the Old South"