“An arresting piece of popular history.” —Sean Wilentz, The New York Times Book Review
Nicholas Lemann opens this extraordinary book with a riveting account of the horrific events of Easter 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where a white militia of Confederate veterans-turned-vigilantes attacked the black community there and massacred hundreds of people in a gruesome killing spree. This began an insurgency that changed the course of American history: for the next few years white Southern Democrats waged a campaign of political terrorism aiming to overturn the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and challenge President Grant's support for the emergent structures of black political power. Redemption is the first book to describe in uncompromising detail this organized racial violence, which reached its apogee in Mississippi in 1875.
Lemann recounts an era when terrorists oveturned Civil War promise of racial justiceJanuary 24, 2008 Bruce J. Wasser(Lake Bluff, IL) 3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Ten years after the end of the Civil War, an organized group of terrorists successfully overthrew legitimate governments in the American South. Using techniques as varied as economic threats, political intimidation and outright murder, these white terrorists "redeemed" their states from the wrongs they thought had been committed against them by the federal government. The "wrongs" in question stem from the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, guaranteeing African-Americans full and equal participation in politics and opening the door to the possibilities of racial amity after centuries of the degradations and horrors of slavery.
Nicholas Lemann interprets this dismal subjugation of African-Americans and their white allies in his fast-paced, richly anecdotal "Redeemed." Lemann describes, analyzes and punctures the myth propagated by racist white Southerners (and sadly embraced by war-weary, disillusioned Northerners) that Reconstruction was evil incarnate -- a decade that encouraged Black vengeance, abetted by nefarious, self-serving white "carpetbaggers." Indeed, the author turns the white argument on its head; ridiculing this "white fantasy of courage and self-protection against an unimaginably horrible Negro threat," Lemann rails against the very term "Redemption," a term white Southerners used to imply "a divine sanction" for their "campaign of political violence, defiance of national government and local repeal of part of the Constitution."
Against this backdrop of denial of constitutional rights, Lemann focuses on Adelbert Ames, a white Civil War hero who assumes responsibility as the governor of Mississippi, a state seething with white resentment. Initially opportunistic and cavalier about African-American rights, Ames evolves -- politically and personally -- into a passionate advocate of the civil and political rights of the newly enfranchised African-American. Through the prism of Ames' governorship, Lemann details the ferocity of racist resistance and the discouraging lack of commitment from the national government, once the champion of the former slave. Ames fall from political power parallels the ascension of neo-slavery in the South.
Included in "Redeemed" is a powerful concluding chapter that summarizes how historians and molders of public opinion warped Americans perception of the immediate post-Civil War period. A blatantly racist interpretation of Reconstruction (one historian labeled enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments "the most soul-sickening spectacle that Americans have ever been called upon to behold") justified Jim Crow laws. President Wilson lauded the disgusting portrayal of African-Americans in D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation;" he stated that "it is like writing history with lightening." The United States has struggled with the costs of forsaking racial justice since, and only until the Civil Rights era of the mid-twentieth century did the nation's attention once again return to the unfinished promise of the Civil War.
Written for a large audience, "Redemption" is not without flaws. On the very first page, Nicholas Lemann inexplicably misinterprets the legal impact of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The author may be guilty of overestimating Ames' idealism and understating his otherwise understandable ambition. Notwithstanding, "Redemption" is an important book, a healthy antidote to the millions of words spent justifying racist terrorism.
More misleading propaganda from the Victors of the War of Northern AgressionNovember 19, 2007 Mark T. Raines(Bogota) 3 out of 27 found this review helpful
Yet one more failed attempt to persuade Americans that Northerners are good and Southerners are bad. Too bad and I see this book is not doing well, you know why? Southerners have come back and will no longer accept this form of no child left behind at the federal level revised history. Let's read the accounts those whites who had to endure during and after "Reconstruction" and see who really were the victims. Study your history folks the truth always speaks louder than propaganda such as with this garbage written by Lemann. Lincoln and his cabinet said many times blacks would never assimilate in this USA and that was the only truth they spoke, just take at look at our society now.
Beyond RedemptionNovember 8, 2007 Giordano Bruno(Wherever I am, I am.) 13 out of 17 found this review helpful
In the decade from the end of the Civil War to the fraudulent brokered election of Rutherford Hayes, two of the most shameful crimes of American history occurred in tandem: the murderous re-establishment of White rule in the former Confederacy, initiating a century of racial oppression and apartheid enforced by lynching; and the devolution of the "Free Soil Free Labor" Republican Party into its persistent status as the factotum of the "malefactors of great wealth" as Theodore Roosevelt christened them, with the cynical abandonment of the forner slaves into the bloody hands of their former owners. Nicholas Lemann gives a vivid and believable account of both disasters, focusing his narrative on the figure of Adelbert Ames (senator and governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction) and using Ames's papers as a major source of information.
Some months ago I wrote a review of the famous DW Griffith movie Birth of a Nation, in which I suggested that the craft and the content of a work of art cannot and should not be disarticulated. I received a blast of comments accusing me of calling for censorship. That ugly movie, however, was more than a bit of cinematographic innovation. It was and still is a centerpiece of the Southern apologetics for "Redemption" (the term invented by Southerners for what Northerners call Reconstruction). Lemann's book is the most vivid refutation available to general readers of that shameful collection of deliberate lies and foolish self-deceptions sometimes called the Myth of the Lost Cause. One could quibble with Lemann's subtitle, however; the butchery and terrorism of the White Liners in Mississippi was sadly NOT the Last Battle of the Civil War. As witnessed by the current events in Louisiana and the spate of noose displays in the South, the last battle of the Civil War has not yet been fought.
Several previous reviewers have pointed out flaws in Mr. Lemann's efforts, including his misstatement concerning the Emancipation Proclamation. Others have challenged his legitimacy as an historian. He is indeed a mere journalist by profession, but I doubt many of his critics (short of Sean Wilentz) could produce a more thoroughly researched or better integrated account of the events and their aftermath. The book is quite well foot-noted, and the concluding "Note on Sources" is ample and useful. I've read two of Lemann's previous books and I'm prepared to congratulate him on making spectacular progress in style and methodology, from the servile popularism of mere journalism to the rarified heavens of elite historiography. Come on, guys! It's a powerful book! And it's good medicine for the recurrent fevers of an America which has never taken Socrates' injunction to Know Thyself seriously!
One ironic sidelight, from the last chapter: When JFK wrote his campaign-oriented "Profiles in Courage", one of the 'courageous' whom he lauded was Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, a leader of the effort to disenfranchise Black Republicans and one of the most repulsive hypocrites in American history. But Kennedy needed acceptability in the South... Now that the Party of Lincoln has reconfigured itself as the Dixiecrat Party, perhaps Lamar can be heard laughing in his grave.
A Needed CorrectiveApril 10, 2007 Philip A. True(Fairfax, VA USA) 6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Nicholas Lemann's book "Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War," focuses on mostly forgotten and often sanitized versions of specific incidents that marked the end of Reconstruction and the regaining by White Southerns of state and local government institutions leading to Jim Crow and Segregation that continued for another 90 years or so. The book, relatively brief, examines in detail several incidents, one in Lousiana, the others in Mississippi where local vigalante groups seized control from local black officials through intimidation and massacres. It is perhaps not coincidential that the worst offenses took place in Mississippi, and perhaps some sort of rough justice that in exchange Mississippi remained for decades afterwards on the lowest rung of the ladder among the states in nearly every social and economic ranking.
Much of the book is through the eyes of one Adelbert Ames, a Union general, senator and governor of Mississippi, as revealed in the copius correspondence with his wife, Blanche Butler, who most of the time remained at home in the North. Because of weariness of the part of the North, insufficient troops, deliberate foot-dragging by US officials sympathetic to the South, and indecisiveness on the part of President Grant, these events from 1874-76 were allowed to precede with little intervention and protection of Black citizens. In effect, the withdrawal of Northern troops in 1877, the result of a compromise that ended the electoral stalemate in the Hayes/Tilden presidential election of 1876, overturned a major achievement of the Civil War, namely full citizenship and voting privileges for former African slaves. The result was another dark stain on American history and our pretenses of a just and equitable society where everyone has the chance to be president.
Because of its brevity, the book suffers from a lack of context of how overall Reconstruction had proceeded in the South, it's weaknesses and its victories. The book also would have been improved through a map, particularly Mississippi and the various places where the rampages of the vigantes took place. Another improvement would have been photographs of the several colorful characters portrayed. But all in all, for a brief look at an important moment in American history, the book is highly recommended.
Last Battle?March 13, 2007 Kevin Killian(San Francisco, CA United States) 2 out of 6 found this review helpful
The subtitle is a little bit of a cheat, for the Civil War was long over by the time the massacres of 1875 began, but after reading Nicholas Lemann's book on the failure of Reconstruction and the life of Civil War General Adelbert Ames, I can see why he decided to bend the truth and capture the huge Civil War market.
he shows how JFK was a patsy to the Southern Conservative myth of Reconstruction and how, in PROFILES IN COURAGE (1956) Kennedy included Lucius Lamar of Mississippi as an avatar of courage, when in actuality he was a liar and a bigot and was personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of Mississippi freedmen. What was JFK thinking? Well, as Lemann points out, this was not an anomaly in Kennedy's otherwise antiracist public profile. Indeed it was part and parcel of his curiously suspect voting record and public stand towards the race question. It was as though, in the polarized 1950s, he had to keep the Southern Democrats happy in order to win their support for the campaign he saw coming his way. PROFILES IN COURAGE dismisses Adelbert Ames, Lemann's (admittedly flawed) hero, as a mere carpetbagger, not worthy of living in Mississippi, a `foreigner' and an Abolitionist. The strange thing is that, he lived so long (at age 98, he was the oldest surviving Civil War officer) his daughter Blanche was on hand to shame Kennedy into agreeing to change future editions of PROFILES. Then her years of disappointment began, for even though Senator, and then President Kennedy, had agreed to re-research Reconstruction, he never did, and when she kept bugging him he enlisted the help of her grandson, "Paper Lion" George Plimpton, to call his honorable kinswoman off his back. Of course all of these people had incredible privilege and wealth.
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