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Book Review: Redemption
Posted by Kevin

On Easter Sunday, 1873, white men — mostly former Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, surrounded the courthouse where a group of black men where holed up. The black men represented the legal government of the county, the white men represented the absolute refusal of whites in Louisiana to treat blacks as anything even resembling human beings. The white men attacked the out gunned blacks and beat them back into the court house, where they used a captured black to set fire to the building. The black men were allowed to burn to death. Most of the captives were executed the next day.

In 1921, the town of Colfax put up a monument to the battle. It read:

In Loving
Remembrance

Erected
To the Memory
Of the Heroes

…

Who Fell in the Coulfax
Riots Fighting For
White Supremacy

April 13, 873

I left the names of the three whites who died in the massacre. After reading this book, you would too. It is the tale of how the civil war was finally lost, at least in Mississippi and Louisiana. In essence, Whites in the South refused to treat freed slaves as anything other than, well, slaves. They expected their former chattel to behave as if the chains still existed, and when Blacks attempted to claim for themselves the rights all people are entitled to, Whites killed them. They killed them without provocation, without reason, without mercy. They killed for the explicit reason of making sure that Blacks could not vote, could not participate as the equals of Jim Crow was not a system of laws; it was the pale reflection of the violent will of the White South. Former Confederate soldiers and the cream of Southern society banned together ot impose its will upon the

Nicholas Lemann tells this story through the history of Adlebert Ames, former war hero and eventually Senator and Governor of Mississippi, and tells it well. His research is impeccable; events are told with the backing of a wealth of period source documents. His prose is sparse and clear and the more powerful for it. And Lemann never flinches from the true horror of the period. This is an infuriating book. If your blood doesn’t boil over the depredations described in this history, then there is something wrong with you. Leman does a good job not only of cataloging what happened but also what it meant to the people involved. The horror of the time is abundantly clear. If the book has a flaw, it is that it does not always do a good job of making clear how much the events in Mississippi mirrored those in other parts of the South. The book leaves the reader with the impression that Mississippi was representative of the Reconstruction South, but it doesn’t always prove the contention.

The impression, though, is reinforced by history. In the end, the murders and terrorists won all over the South — the North was too tired of war and too racist itself to beat back the Klan and other White Supremacy organizations like the White Lines. Despite the struggle of people like Ames and others from the North — the “carpetbaggers” so reviled in Southern mythology — the North was unwilling to force the surrender at Appomattox to mean both Union and Freedom. In the end, the noble Lost Cause, the heritage that I am told over and over again I should respect, degenerated into barbarism, murder, terrorism, and the explicit goal of making sure that no Black would ever live a life of anything other than complete and abject subservience to Whites. That fact and the mythology that grew up to excuse that fact dominated American politics until at least the 1980s. You can see the outline of almost every piece of racial politics in this country in Reconstruction Mississippi, especially in the refusal of Whites to accept that Blacks were full human beings and in the easy recourse to violence by Whites in service of that bigotry.

Lemann has written a depressingly comprehensive history of how the Civil War was lost to the forces of racism and hate in Mississippi. If you want to understand the Reconstruction — and thus the last hundred and forty years of American history — you should read this book.

January 8th, 2007 Reviews, Books | 5 comments