Chapter Fifteen Livestock, Boundaries, and Public Space in Spartanburg African American Men, Elite W hite W omen, and the Spectacle of Conjugal Relations Scott Nelson A survey of the sexual landscape of the Spartanburg region in the post-war period must start with the history of livestock: cows, sheep, pigs, and horses. 1 Before the Civil War, large farm animals outnumbered people in this South Carolina county by almost four to one. Their history of the coming of war, the human pilgrimages across the state, and the emergence of the most violent Klan in the South would likely be very different from the history we have received from scholars who rely on human records. But I cannot provide that story. I jack facility with archaeological records, and would find working through the remains of nineteenth-century live- stock a daunting and smelly task. Nevertheless I will risk anthropomorphism in an effort to describe the way in which these mute animals may give us another way into post-war Spartanburg—if not their perspective, then perhaps their place, in the reshaping of race, class, and gender boundaries in bloody Spartanburg. In a certain sense, I am being contrary here. When I talk about livestock, I am talking about them as capital resources, as consumers of land, and as goods in a capitalist market. That the counties around Spartanburg relied on the raising and selling of livestock meant that conflicts after the war were not the familiar southern conflicts over who worked in cotton or tobacco fields, the portions divided in share- crops, or the market price of fertilizer. Rather, Spartanburg's position in the live- stock trade made economic conflicts in the region much more complex and, I would argue, left the roles of those who managed, rode, and sold livestock open to con- stant, bitter renegotiations. The borders between men and women, and between blacks and whites, remained unstable in post-war Spartanburg because the eco- nomic resources connected to livestock—the land they needed and the cost of the corn they consumed—were drastically altered first by the Civil War and then again by the emergence of an interstate railway system. Where previously every member of the community had a more or less established position in relation to beasts and to each other—for example, a different job when it came to pigs, depending on race, class, and gender—these broader economic changes in the wake of the war 3 13