Nicholas Lemann's Redemption: An Analysis

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The United States of America is a country that was founded upon the belief that every citizen in the Union has specific, basic, human rights that no government can take away from them. Through time, this notion has not changed. Rather, the changing notion of citizenship is what is manifested as the primary motivator of the American Civil War and sequentially Reconstruction. By the end of the Civil War in 1865, slavery had been abolished. However, a new presence of darkness was revealed in the years following the war. This new darkness was the ever-growing racial discourse between Black and White southerners. This discourse was so palpable that it affected everything from family affairs to major politics. Nicholas Lemann’s Redemption: The last …show more content…

His rendition of life in postbellum southern states, especially Mississippi, goes even further to describe the corruption embedded in the politics regarding formerly Confederate states. Moreover, Lemann describes the events and undertakings in postwar Mississippi and Louisiana through a masterful work that accurately exhibits the racial discourse that shaped the entire Reconstruction Era in Redemption. The most prominent and repulsive display of violence is first discussed in the prologue of Nicholas Lemann’s Redemption. It is here that an account of the massacre in Colfax, Louisiana is recorded. Therein, the Colfax massacre is recounted as a battle; however, the slaughter of more than seventy-one black citizens compared to the controversial death of one white man suggests that there was no fight between the blacks and whites. Instead, it is rather clear that the white citizens, under the command of Christopher Columbus Nash, were motivated by pure hatred of the opposite race to butcher innocent black citizens (Prologue). This, …show more content…

The suppression of the black voters was solely done through violence and the ensuing fear caused by the whites’ terrorism of the blacks. Lemann utilizes a series of questions and answers between a congressional investigating committee and a black farmer, Moses Kellaby, to further display the constant fear in which black citizens lived under the oppression of White Liners. Kellaby is recorded to state that the “White Line” organizations purpose is to “…kill all the darkies out,” and later goes on to add that, “[I]f a man does not vote as [the White Liners] want him to, he stands a poor hack. If a man does not vote the democratic ticket, he is gone up.” (Chapter 2). This inquisition is not only representative of the fear in which the black community lived in, but also the corruption of electoral fraud perpetrated by the White Liners, and presumably the Democratic Party. However, White Liners and taxpayer’s leagues were not the only ones guilty of corruption. Adelbert Ames, the Radical Republican Governor of Mississippi (among other titles such as General and Senator), was rather new to the scene of politics when he took office in 1868. He held his governorship for two years and was succeeded by his rival, James Lusk Alcorn in 1870. Alcorn was a former Democrat who, after realizing that Mississippi’s popular vote was that of

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