Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War

"[A] brilliant new book . . . Redemption is accessible and important, and we cannot really understand race or political power in modern America without understanding what happened in the South a decade after Appomattox." --Jon Meacham, Washington Monthly

"Lemann . . . has told this sad, heartbreaking story with passion and authority. He does not tar all whites with the brush of racism or violence, and he does not excuse Reconstruction its excesses and mistakes." --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

"Lemann performs a sterling service in excavating these hidden ruins, and Redemption is a superb, supple work of popular narrative history backed up by sound archival evidence." --Alexander Rose, The New York Observer

"An arresting piece of popular history." —Sean Wilentz, The New York Times Book Review

Nicholas Lemann opens this extraordinary 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 began 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. Redemption is the first book to describe in uncompromising detail this organized racial violence, which reached its apogee in Mississippi in 1875.