John b rayner biography books

In this fascinating story of two nineteenth-century southern political mavericks, Gregg Cantrell details their fate as dissenters, telling a human story at once heroic and shameful, hopeful and tragic.

The two mavericks were the slaveholding congressman and planter Kenneth Rayner of North Carolina and his illegitimate mulatto son, John B. Rayner of Texas.
Born in 1808, Kenneth served in the North Carolina legislature for twenty years and in Congress for six as a Whig.

John b rayner biography

In 1854 he became a major leader of the American (Know-Nothing) party. His staunch Unionism and a willingness to cooperate with Republicans incurred the wrath of his fellow southerners. After supporting secession, working for a peace settlement during the war, writing a biography of Andrew Johnson, and going broke in a grandiose cotton-planting venture, he joined the Republican parry and held federal offices in the Grant, Hayes, Ga