Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War

Synopsis

It was as if the Civil War had not really ended with the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. In the South, a second war went on for years over the question of rights, especially voting rights, for African-Americans. Nicholas Lemann's remarkable new book tells the story of the climactic events in this war, which brought Reconstruction to an end and laid the groundwork for the long reign of Jim Crow. Lemann's extraordinary narrative starts with the horrific events of Easter Sunday 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where Confederate veterans-turned vigilantes raised a militia to oust the elected black town government and, in a gruesome killing spree, massacred dozens of people. That was only the beginning: white Democrats then activated an organized campaign of political terrorism and intimidation that aimed to overturn the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution and challenge President Grant's support of the emerging structures of black political power. Redemption is the first book to describe in uncompromising detail this armed campaign of racial violence, which reached its apogee in Mississippi in 1875. In an atmosphere of civic chaos unseen before or since in America, well-financed "White Line" organizations pursued a remorseless strategy that left thousands of black people dead; the goal was to keep hundreds of thousands from voting, out of fear for their lives and livelihoods. Lemann bases his painstaking, devastating account on a wealth of military records, congressional investigations, memoirs, press reports, and the invaluable personal and public papers of Adelbert Ames, the young war hero from Maine who was Mississippi's governor at the time. The conflict was an intense, high-stakes drama with the future of the whole country at stake, and it came to a head when Ames pleaded with President Grant to send federal troops to thwart the white terrorists who were violently disrupting Republican Party activities and Grant wavered. The result was

Copyright:

2006

Book Details

Book Quality:

Excellent

Book Size:

262 Pages

Publisher:

N/A

Date of Addition:

11/15/07

Copyrighted By:

Nicholas Lemann

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Military, Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs, Social Studies, Politics and Government

Submitted By:

Brian Miller

Proofread By:

mary stephens

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.