A century after
Appomattox, the civil rights movement won full citizenship for black Americans in the South. It should not have been necessary: by 1870 those rights were set in the Constitution. This is the story of the terrorist campaign that took them away. Nicholas Lemann opens his extraordinary new 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 was the start of 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'ssupport for the emergent structures of black political power. The remorseless strategy of well-financed "White Line" organizations was to create chaos and keep blacks from voting out of fear for their lives and livelihoods. "
Redemption" is the first book to describe in uncompromising detail this organized racial violence, which reached its apogee in Mississippi in 1875.
Lemann bases his devastating account on a wealth of military records, congressional investigations, memoirs, press reports, and the invaluable papers of Adelbert Ames, the war hero from Maine who was Mississippi's governor at the time. When Ames pleaded with Grant for federal troops who could thwart the white terrorists violently disrupting Republican political activities, Grant wavered, and the result was a bloody, corrupt election in which Mississippi was "redeemed"--that is, returned to white control.
"""
Redemption "makes clear that this is what led to the
death of Reconstruction--and of the rights encoded in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. We are still living with the consequences.
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Background Information
General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ullysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, effectively ending the Civil War. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified after the Civil War in order to guarantee the rights of freed slaves against the state governments of the former Confederacy. Reconstruction was brought to an end in 1877 as part of an informal deal through the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes became President in exchange for a promise to remove federal troops from the Democratic South.
