Book Review

Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War

 

By: Nicholas Lemann

 

 

In Nicholas Lemann’s book, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, he examines the reality of what truly happened in the years of Reconstruction. Throughout my educational career growing up in Kentucky, the Reconstruction Era was always taught as to having sympathy to the already broken ex-confederates. The general idea presented to me in High School was that Reconstruction was a motive of the Union States to take all advantages of the South economically and politically, making the southern states subordinate to that of the North. However, Lemann’s book clearly outlines the motives of the federal government and the uncontrollable violence of the ex-confederates roaming the southern states.

            Lemann begins his book discussing the political career of Adelbert Ames, a Republican from Massachusetts who had also served in the Union Army as General. Ames was sent to Mississippi to provide command the Union troops to patrol the state and to enforce federal rule in the beginning years of Reconstruction. Ames went on to become the Governor of Mississippi and grew to strive for political participation of the freed slaves. The examination of Ames career clarifies that the northerners who took office had the interest of the freed slaves in mind. The book then goes on to explain and describe how terroristic acts and voter intimidation by whites in the south forcibly removed the Republican control that had been in place since the beginning of the Reconstruction Era. Lemann discuss the random and continuous acts of violence by certain groups such as the Ku Klux Klan that would roam the land searching for any black man or republican supporter, and killing them. The terroristic groups would go to such lengths as to go to the man’s house; if he wasn’t there they would inform the family that he will be killed eventually. The purging of the south by these terroristic groups led to the extermination of Republican rule in the south, and left control in the southern sympathetic Democrats. The book discusses state legislation enforced by the Democrats after the removal of all federal troops and Republican participation such as the Mississippi Plan and the Georgia Plan. These acts enforced by the state constrained the civil rights of African Americans for almost a hundred years.