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    Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War
    Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War
    Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War
    Audiobook8 hours

    Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War

    Written by Nicholas Lemann

    Narrated by Michael Prichard

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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's support 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 5, 2006
    ISBN9781400172832
    Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War
    Author

    Nicholas Lemann

    Nicholas Lemann, born in New Orleans in 1954, began his journalistic career there and then worked at Washington Monthly, Washington Post, and Texas Monthly, of which he was executive editor. A frequent contributor to national magazines, he was national correspondent of The Atlantic Monthly and is now a staff writer at The New Yorker. His books include the prizewinning The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991).

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    • 5/5
      This book shows how, in 1875, political power in Mississippi was wrested by violent means from the black-supported (and largely black-staffed) Republican government by what was essentially the pre-war white power structure. Many blacks were killed in the state in that year, and blacks were prevented from voting. Lemann's documentation of what happened, based on testimony in Congressional investigations and on other contemporary sources, is impeccable, and his conclusion is overwhelming. Local whites, with the covert and sometimes overt support of whites elsewhere in the South, carried out with extreme violence a successful rebellion against the authority of the U.S. central government. Its purpose -- and result -- was the disenfranchisement of the black population, which in turn led to black political powerlessness, black economic subordination, and Jim Crow. The process, or "Mississippi Plan" was adopted throughout the South in the wake of the Compromise of 1877, which gave the Republicans the Presidency and the Democrats a free hand in the south.The book is fascinating in itself-- it shows more clearly than anything else I have read how we got from the Emancipation Proclamation to Jim Crow -- but it is also a compelling illustration of the power of political myth. In the latter part of his book, Lemann describes how the racist violence of 1875 was converted into the "Redemption" myth of a valiant Southern effort to oust corrupt carpet-baggers, and restore self-government in the south. This myth took hold not only of popular culture (viz "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With the Wind") but of serious academic discussion, all the way into the second half of the 20th century. Myths like this can, and do, kill.