Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "Redemption"

Nicholas Lemann is Henry R. Luce Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and author of Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War.

I asked him to put his book to the "page 69 test"; here is what he reported:

Page 69 of Redemption is about Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, who was a Confederate general, Mississippi Congressman and Senator, and, finally, late in the nineteenth century, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Lamar managed to reverse his longstanding reputation as a Confederate bitter-ender with a single brilliant master-stroke: a florid eulogy, delivered in the House of Representatives in April 1874, for Charles Sumner, the abolitionist Senator from Massachusetts. Lamar used the death of Sumner, whom he had never met, as the occasion to issue a call for national reconciliation and healing. Overnight he became known as a Southern statesman, who believed in states’ rights but not in a return to servitude for the South’s newly freed slaves. The speech was still reverberating more than eighty years later: John F. Kennedy devoted a chapter of Profiles in Courage to it.

On page 69, however, I present a different and, from the present-day perspective, far less attractive side of Lamar. The University of Mississippi’s archives has a small stack of candid letters Lamar wrote to one of his Mississippi protégés, a lawyer named Edward Clark. Most of page 69 is devoted to quoting at length from a letter Lamar sent Clark just six months before his famous eulogy, in which he railed against the likelihood of Mississippi’s falling under the political control of a black-majority political coalition. He ended the letter this way: “It does seem to me that if there ever was a time when the white people of this state, the men in whose veins flows the blood of the ruling races of the world, should rise & with one unanimous voice protest against the domination to be piled upon them the present is that time.”

It’s my view that Lamar’s eulogy for Charles Sumner, and his behavior in Washington generally, was a pose, and quite an effective one. His true aim was to rid Mississippi of an empowered African-American electorate, by any means necessary. He seems to have realized that he would be more likely to achieve it through the appearance of conciliation than through open resistance. And his side won—through a coordinated campaign of terrorist violence in Mississippi that most of Redemption is devoted to describing, and that Lamar knew about, benefited from (he was quickly promoted from the House to the Senate) and kept just out of the range of his own impeccable national public reputation.

Many thanks to Nicholas for the input.

Click here to read an excerpt from Redemption.

Among the praise for Redemption:

"It is no secret that emancipation did not mark an end to the suffering of African Americans in the South. Building on the major historical studies of Reconstruction by scholars such as John Hope Franklin and Eric Foner, Nicholas Lemann’s gripping account of anti-black hatred and violence in Reconstruction-era Mississippi dramatizes these struggles and brings the history of this roiling period front and center, where it belongs."
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

"It is no surprise that Nick Lemann, with his enormous skills as a writer, has taken one of the least understood and most manipulated moments in our history and redeemed it—and the truth—for the rest of us. Now, thanks to his superb storytelling, some of the fog around this dark chapter has lifted."
--Ken Burns

"Short and concise, Nicholas Lemann’s Redemption is one of the very best accounts of Reconstruction I’ve ever read. Focusing on the Southern ‘Redeemers’’ slaughter of innocent blacks as well as the hopes and trials of Adelbert Ames, the heroic Civil War general who became governor of Mississippi, Lemann succeeds in showing that the defeat of Reconstruction was in many ways ‘the last battle of the Civil War,’ a battle won of course by the South."
--David Brion Davis, Yale University