22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How the South Eventually Won the Civil War, December 10, 2006
This review is from: Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (Hardcover)
Well, Nick Lemann has done it again. As he did in his groundbreaking and award winning book "The Promise Land," Professor Lemann has again burrowed deep beneath the surface of American culture into its undercurrents and subtext to mine more pure gold. Despite the fact that he is a Southerner, few historians of American culture exhibit the exquisite balance and honesty on the sensitive issue of race as does Nick Lemann. You can take his narratives of American history to the bank. He is the genuine article. Amen.
In this little gem, which will inevitably become a classic of American history, Lemann tells the story of what happened after the Civil war, in fact what happened after Reconstruction. He does so at eye level and in vivid color. He tells us of how the south was "redeemed," and how America became "One Racist White Nation Under God." Leaning heavily on WEB DuBois' work, but without the socialist over and undertones, Lemann makes no mistake about the fact that the radioactive fallout, the racist culture we have today, is nothing but the background noise from America's own Cosmic Big Bang, the Civil War.
Mostly through the eyes of Adelbert Ames, the Civil War hero from Maine, who served as the Governor of Mississippi, the author tells about how the 14th and 15th Amendments were declared null and void. Through unremitting murder, brutality and terror by white vigilante groups, the weak kneed Northern occupiers eventually gave in to the southern brand of terror and insurrection, which the author refers to as the "last battle of the Civil War." Neighborhood and regional terror involving the most grotesque and inhuman violence was the motif that was spread across the region and led to a reversal of the Northern victory and a win of the Civil War for the South, a victory that still reverberates through American's race-based culture.
The subtext of the book is at least as important and as potent as are the details of the context. It makes clear that the real birth of the American nation occurred in the aftermath of the Civil War, when the South was Redeemed, in the ineptness and utter lack of commitment on the part of the Northern occupiers to protect what was important about the nation -- its laws and the Constitution against 911-styled terrorism.
For the North, Reconstruction was just an overwhelming "mop-up" operation; for the South, it was existential, a matter of the survival of the white race and the southern way of life.
The north tried to solve the daunting post-Civil War problems by "making it up on the fly" but failed miserably. Their vacillation, ineptness, and lack of commitment as overseers did little more than stoked the fires that gave full expression to the terror underlying the sentiments of DW Griffith movie "Birth of a Nation." That sentiment, basically, was (and to a large extent still is): "Get your guns, the niggers are coming to get our white women."
So, in a real sense, this sentiment underlying DW Griffith's movie is the leitmotif of American culture, and as a result, is a more valid symbol of our nation's birth than is the Constitution, or the Revolutionary War. As Lemann makes clear in the unstated subtext of the book, the South in effect won the Civil War, and today we are still living in the afterglow of the background radiation of the terror that "redeemed" the South.
As an aside to the book, I was fortunate enough to see the C-span interview between Professor Lemann and some University of Maryland Professor, whose name I conveniently forgot. This professor did his best to twist the story in Redemption out of context and into another milquetoast cover story about the meaning of the Civil War and Reconstruction. To his credit, Lemann resisted and in his own diplomatic way, trampled the guy.
Five Stars
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16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beyond Redemption, November 8, 2007
In the decade from the end of the Civil War to the fraudulent brokered election of Rutherford Hayes, two of the most shameful crimes of American history occurred in tandem: the murderous re-establishment of White rule in the former Confederacy, initiating a century of racial oppression and apartheid enforced by lynching; and the devolution of the "Free Soil Free Labor" Republican Party into its persistent status as the factotum of the "malefactors of great wealth" as Theodore Roosevelt christened them, with the cynical abandonment of the forner slaves into the bloody hands of their former owners. Nicholas Lemann gives a vivid and believable account of both disasters, focusing his narrative on the figure of Adelbert Ames (senator and governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction) and using Ames's papers as a major source of information.
Some months ago I wrote a review of the famous DW Griffith movie Birth of a Nation, in which I suggested that the craft and the content of a work of art cannot and should not be disarticulated. I received a blast of comments accusing me of calling for censorship. That ugly movie, however, was more than a bit of cinematographic innovation. It was and still is a centerpiece of the Southern apologetics for "Redemption" (the term invented by Southerners for what Northerners call Reconstruction). Lemann's book is the most vivid refutation available to general readers of that shameful collection of deliberate lies and foolish self-deceptions sometimes called the Myth of the Lost Cause. One could quibble with Lemann's subtitle, however; the butchery and terrorism of the White Liners in Mississippi was sadly NOT the Last Battle of the Civil War. As witnessed by the current events in Louisiana and the spate of noose displays in the South, the last battle of the Civil War has not yet been fought.
Several previous reviewers have pointed out flaws in Mr. Lemann's efforts, including his misstatement concerning the Emancipation Proclamation. Others have challenged his legitimacy as an historian. He is indeed a mere journalist by profession, but I doubt many of his critics (short of Sean Wilentz) could produce a more thoroughly researched or better integrated account of the events and their aftermath. The book is quite well foot-noted, and the concluding "Note on Sources" is ample and useful. I've read two of Lemann's previous books and I'm prepared to congratulate him on making spectacular progress in style and methodology, from the servile popularism of mere journalism to the rarified heavens of elite historiography. Come on, guys! It's a powerful book! And it's good medicine for the recurrent fevers of an America which has never taken Socrates' injunction to Know Thyself seriously!
One ironic sidelight, from the last chapter: When JFK wrote his campaign-oriented "Profiles in Courage", one of the 'courageous' whom he lauded was Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, a leader of the effort to disenfranchise Black Republicans and one of the most repulsive hypocrites in American history. But Kennedy needed acceptability in the South... Now that the Party of Lincoln has reconfigured itself as the Dixiecrat Party, perhaps Lamar can be heard laughing in his grave.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
THE POLITICAL COUNTERREVOLUTION IN THE SOUTH AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, December 1, 2006
This review is from: Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (Hardcover)
THE BATTLE AGAINST RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
The Reconstruction period after the defeat of the South in the American Civil is a much disputed and misunderstood period, and in earlier times dominated by historians sympathetic to the Southern cause. Moreover, many books on the subject tend to center either on the question of the federal government's `benign neglect' and eventual abandonment of the freed slaves or on the freed slaves (and their white allies, the carpetbaggers and scalawags) incapacity to govern in place of the traditional planter oligarchy of a defeated Southern nation. Mr. Lemann's book, although correctly paying attention to those issues, takes another tact and addresses the less well-known military actions by defeated white Southerners as a key to the failure of Reconstruction. Although this book will not replace Eric Foner's now classic Reconstruction as the definitive text on the period it should have a prominent place in the academic controversy over the failures of the Reconstruction period.
If, as I believe, the American Civil War of 1861-65 was a second American Revolution consolidating the gains of the first bourgeois revolution by taking the slavery question and the question of a unitary continent-wide national government off the agenda then the Reconstruction period takes on more than a tragic or ill-advised attempt to reorder the nature of government in the South. Thus, the role of the Klu Klux Klan, White Camelia and other white militia organizations in destroying the basis for universal suffrage and economic equality by military force can be defined as a political counterrevolution, and a successful one. It is the gruesome and deadly story of this fight that plays a central role in Mr. Lemann's narrative, particularly in the key states of Mississippi and Louisiana.
Without denying the importance of the serious mistakes and ultimate capitulation of the Federal government on the question of black emancipation, without denying the important failure of the Radical Republicans to fight for their program for the South and without denying that the condition of servitude had rendered many blacks not immediately capacity of forming and running local democratic governments one comes away from a reading of this book with the conclusion that the black liberation struggle, and not for the first time, was militarily defeated in this country. What portion this military defeat of the black liberation struggle played in the overall defeat of Reconstruction the reader can decide. But it played a part. Read on.
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