"Through the life of Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina's self-styled agrarian rebel, this book traces the history of white male supremacy and its discontents from the era of plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow. Born into a wealthy slaveholding family, Tillman spent his career attempting to re-create the world he had lost. As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla and local Democratic activist, he helped defeat black and white challenges to white supremacy.

Later, during two terms as governor and four as U.S. senator, he steered a complicated political course between conservatives and Populists, seeking a balance of local control and state-level reform that would protect white men and their households from federal intrusion, "Negro domination," and the machinations of the "money power."".

"Friend and foe alike - and generations of historians - interpreted Tillman's physical and rhetorical violence in defense of white supremacy not as part of a strategy to maintain social and political authority but as a matter of racial and gender instinct. This book instead reveals that Tillman's white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life."--BOOK JACKET.