Hunting and fishing show racial divide after Civil War says new book by C-SC professor

Hunting and fishing were more than just outdoor recreation in the post-Civil War South, they illustrated the racial disparities between whites and African Americans, according to a just released book written by Scott E. Giltner, PhD, assistant professor of history at Culver-Stockton College.
Hunting and Fishing in the New South: Black Labor and White Leisure After the Civil War will be released by Johns Hopkins University Press this month.  The publisher says Dr. Giltner’s book “re-examines the dynamics of race relations in the post-Civil War South from an altogether fresh perspective: field sports.”
The book examines the differences in how each group approached the activities after the Civil War. Wealthy white men from both South and North traveling to southern hunting and fishing lodges as recreation and to socialize with their peers; while African Americans, who had hunted and fished for food and survival for years, became the guides to successful outings.  “African Americans used their mastery of these sports to enter into market activities normally denied people of color, thereby becoming more economically independent from their white employers,” according to the catalog. “Whites came to view blacks participating in hunting and fishing as a serious threat to the South’s labor system.  Giltner shows how African American freedom developed in this racially tense environment – how a black sense of competence and authority flourished in a Jim Crow setting.”
Dr. Giltner said his book explores the ways in which hunting and fishing became a marker for racial and class status.  “For well-to-do whites, the ability to hunt and fish freely, to use certain methods and equipment, and to employ black laborers to attend their excursions became ways to publicly display their wealth and social standing … a sporting activity,” Dr. Giltner explained.  “For African Americans, particularly slaves, hunting and fishing were vivid symbols of economic, cultural, and spatial separation from whites that reflected the struggle for control over their own lives and labors. Hunting and fishing became forms of work that demonstrated not aristocratic pretension but the pressing need for food and income.”
Dr. Giltner said the book is a natural outcome of his ongoing interest in and research about African American history, environmental history, and the history of sport. Earlier work in the same area resulted in his chapter, “Slave Hunting and Fishing in the Antebellum South,” in To Love the Wind and the Rain: African Americans and Environmental History, published in 2005 by University of Pittsburgh Press. “Writing this new book has enriched my knowledge of African American life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and deepened my awareness of how important both sports and the natural environment – as well as the freedom to use both as we choose – are to people’s lives,” he added.
Not only is this Dr. Giltner’s first book to be published, but it is also the first full-length book that he has written.
“Writing a book showed me that some accomplishments take a long time, and patience is needed along with hard work.  It may take a while, but if you keep at it, you can do what you need to do.  It also deepened my appreciation for the importance of organization and attention to detail and, quite often, reminded me of the consequences of failing to remember that,” Dr.  Giltner said. “ I hope that it has made me both a better teacher and a better scholar.”
Dr. Giltner was born and raised in Northeast Ohio and received his bachelor’s degree in history from Hiram College before going on to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh.  While at Pittsburgh, he was awarded the Lillian B. Lawler Predoctoral Fellowship and won the Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship from the Virginia Historical Society.  He earned his master’s degree in 1998 and is doctorate in 2005 after which he joined the faculty at Culver-Stockton.