"Hatred to the Union, treason, cannot be whipped out of men. Defeats, disasters, and humiliations are not likely to generate love for our Government . . . The country makes a sad and grievous mistake when it supposes that all the evils of slavery and rebellion vanished on that day of surrender at Appomattox Court-House." Senatory Adelbert Ames, Mississippi, March 21, 1871.
Redemption: the Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann (2006) details the South's ongoing struggle for White Supremacy during the years immediately after the Civil War. After giving a cursory background of the murders of Blacks in the South by the White League and "Regulators" which eventually found a home in the Klu Klux Klan, the book focuses upon one Adelbert Ames, a former Union general from Maine. Ames, after a tour in Europe, came back to the USA to be stationed in South Carolina and then Mississippi during Reconstruction.
Ames, a bright, educated Yankee, was elected to the US Senate and then to the Governor's office of Mississippi. The book details how the white South attempted to hold unto their antebellum supremacy via political gamesmanship and outright violence and suppression of Black civil rights. The book's apex is the campaign of terror unleashed on Mississippi in 1875 by the White League and how it helped break the back of the Republican Party and dashed all hopes of civil rights for Blacks for a century. It is a sad and shameful history of a sad and shameful time.
All the same, a very worthwhile read and you will learn all kinds of interesting facts. For example, I had always wondered why the Cole-Younger gang traveled all the way north to Northfield, Minnesota to rob that particular bank. It was because Adelbert Ames' family owned a flour mill in Northfield, Minnesota and the gang, all CSA veterans, intended to take the family's money.
