Winner of the Gulf South Historical Association Book Award

Originally published in 1998, Samuel Hyde’s Pistols and Politics reveals the reasons behind the remarkable levels of violence in Louisiana’s Florida parishes in the nineteenth century. In the South that century, there existed numerous local pockets where cultures and values different from those of the dominant planter class prevailed. One such area was the Florida parishes of southeastern Louisiana, where peculiar conditions combined to create an enclave of white yeomen, and where in the years after the Civil War, levels of conflict among these men escalated to create a state of chronic anarchy, producing an enduring legacy of bitterness and suspicion. In his careful study of a society that degenerated into utter chaos, Hyde illuminated the factors that allowed these conditions to arise and triumph. In this expanded edition of Hyde’s original work, he deftly brings his analysis forward to account for the continuation of violence and mayhem in the region into the twentieth century.