Chapter one maps out a national conversation about poor white southerners that took shape in the pages of late nineteenth-century literary magazines. In this section, I argue that nonfiction essays in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras launched a lively debate about poor white southerners’ roles in the nation that continued in the dialect fiction tales published by the august and influential Atlantic group of magazines during the 1880s and 1890s.I analyze how classist portrayals of poor white southern identity shaped the work of local colorists and plantation fiction writers in order to set the backdrop for how Charles Chesnutt pioneered literary forms capable of representing poor white characters in new ways. Chesnutt adapts the frame narrative structure—the hallmark of plantation stories—with an eye toward challenging the denigrating representations of poor white southerners promulgated by writers including Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page.

Literature does not reflect history: it creates possible worlds. The literature of Reconstruction participated in national debates by imagining competing fictional worlds that could have emerged from controversial policies to reconcile former enemies while promoting rights for newly emancipated freedmen. Recent scholarship defines Reconstruction spatially as encompassing the nation, not just the south, and temporally as lasting from the middle of the Civil War to the advent of legalized segregation and disfranchisement in the early twentieth century. This chapter compares works structured by four emerging plots: stories about the Union as it was, romances between northerners and southerners, racial passing, and inheritance. These plots are not mutually exclusive. For instance, romances often have consequences for inheritance. Nonetheless, debates over what sort of nation should emerge from the blood of civil war come alive by comparing how these plots were fashioned in competing ways.