Nicholas Lemann | Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War / 2006

the blueprint for southern racism

by Douglas Messerli

Nicholas Lemann Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)

In his stunning new history, Nicholas Lemann lays to rest myths of the Southern Reconstruction era that have stood more than a century, while presenting us with an appealingly brooding but dashing hero, Adelbert Ames, and his strong-willed and loving wife, Blanche. By following the voluminous correspondence between these two (hating Mississippi, where her husband been appointed by Ulysses S. Grant as provisional governor, Blanche remained for much of their early marriage in her family’s homes in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.) as well as the long trail of documents detailing the investigations into racial violence during Ames’s tenure, Lemann urges in his short book to completely reevaluate Reconstruction and civil rights struggles in the United States.

      The handsome, high-browed, large pupil-eyed Ames, replete with Custer-style beard and moustache, was a Civil War hero who captured Fort Fisher, at the mouth of Cape Fear, North Carolina, during the War. After the War he traveled to Europe, attending a lecture by Charles Dickens and finding an audience with the Prince of Wales and American ambassador, Charles Francis Adams. In France he was presented to Napoleon III at court. In his diary of this trip, Ames noted “…I do not believe in negro suffrage,” later describing the Radical Republican advocates of suffrage as “extremists [who] seem to me to be almost crazy on many points.”

      Understandably, Ames undertook his new position with some consternation. As Lemann underscores, however, Ames was also a great idealist (as opposed to the practical Blance, coming, as she did, from the Butler family, actively involved in politics), and he quite soon came to realize the great injustices being done to the poor blacks of his territory (Mississippi and Arkansas). Appointing himself to the senate, he spoke out for the great problems facing Mississippi and the South, and returning to Mississippi he came to understand through immediate contact and daily reports, just how corrupt were the local leaders and how beastly the newly freed blacks of the South were treated. Ultimately, Ames came to see himself as the only hope for the disenfranchised blacks of the post-War South:

 

“When I took command of this military district, I found that the negroes who had been declared free by the United States were not free, in fact that they were living under a code that made them worse than slaves; and I found that it was necessary to protect them, and I did protect them. I found that their freedom depended on the success of the republican cause, and circumstances grew out of the election which made me believe that I might be of service to the race, in giving them the rights that every American citizen is entitled to all over the country; and so my purpose in becoming a citizen of the State of Mississippi grew out of the necessity of the case. That is my conviction, that I might be of use and advantage to the colored people of the State in securing their actual freedom”

 

The author summarizes Ames’ practical if naively ambitious goals:

 

“Adelbert, the family idealist, laid out for the people of Mississippi, as he took office, a dream of a government that would create a public education system good enough to defeat the illiteracy that pervaded the state; that would operate on a sound financial basis; that would find a way to turn the former slaves from peasants into landowning farmers. …Ames planned to reverse Mississippi’s practice of taking on public debt to finance railroad construction, which was essentially a way of subsidizing the railroads in return for the railroad men’s own personal subsidies to the state legislators. His ideas on this score did not represent the consensus among white Mississippians, to say the least, including those who had enough money and influence to challenge Ames directly.” (pp. 64-65).

 

       Lemann begins his book with the battle of Colfax, Louisiana. In New Orleans, the Republicans—due, in part, to Benjamin Butler’s (Ames’ future father-in-law) military actions of the War—had gained outright control, and the Republican governor of Louisiana in 1873 appointed—after some vacillation—black veteran William Ward to head Grant Parish in the North. Previously, in 1871, the deputy sheriff of the Parish led a mob of fifty armed white men to a home of two black Republican officeholders, set fire to the house and shot the men as they exited. That same year, Ward was reported by whites to have killed a white man, taking him out on the river and hacking him to pieces with a hatchet before dumping his body overboard—a story that, given the hundreds of absurd events invented by southern whites of the time, seems incredulous and certainly is unreliable. 

     To the whites, however, Ward’s 1873 appointment was an outrage. As Ward and other blacks took possession of the Parish courthouse, local white citizens, roaming in possess—only too ready to believe in the Ward legend as well as other tales about blacks rising to power and threatening white families and their households—began killing local blacks. On Easter Sunday, Nash, leading a troop of whites, rode into Colfax and out to a nearby earthworks, wherein blacks had entrenched themselves for protection, warning that all would be killed unless they immediately left. Within a half hour they rained nuts, bolts, hot metal and real cannonballs down upon the earthworks, and the blacks had no choice but to attempt escape; most were hunted down and shot. Another group, however, took cover inside the courthouse, firing at their assailants. Using a black man as their arsonist, the white troop set fire to the courthouse, and in fear of being burned alive, the blacks surrendered. As they exited the courthouse, the whites “slaughtered them.”

     For Lemann this act of butchery is significant because it is basically repeated, if not in detail, in its general pattern, throughout Mississippi over the next years as both parties readied for the 1875 general election. The election of 1874 had already resulted in a radical change in the political outlook; as Adelbert, recognizing the undoing of the Union victory of 1865, noted, “What sorry times have befallen us! The old rebel spirit will not only revive, but it will make itself felt. It will roam over the land, thirsty for revenge, and revenge it will have….” 

     Throughout Lemann’s recountings, the vacillation of President Grant to send in troops to protect the citizens of Vicksburg and his later refusal to send federal troops to help maintain the freedom of blacks throughout Mississippi is represented as license for the various murders of blacks throughout the south. Joining into well-organized militias—whether they described themselves as “White Liners,” “Rifle Clubs,” “the Klu-Klux-Klan,” or just ex-Confederate skirmishers—whites began working with the then Democratic Party in a patterned attack against Republican and black Southerners. Justifying their actions by the legends of rising black military units and armed with racist fears of sexual attacks, they attended Republican fundraisers, debates, and speeches, where they started arguments which ended in outright violence, often lasting for days as they sought out and killed or routed any possible black voter in the neighborhood. A quite thorough investigation into these atrocities, published as the Boutwell Report reads like a catalogue of mayhem and murder throughout the state.

     Lemann uses Kate K. Grant’s novel From Blue to Gray; or, The Battle of Colfax to represent the literary texts that were created throughout the South to justify and immortalize white acts. But, as I have just recounted in my essay (“The Doors of the Past”) there were numerous layers of myths upon which Southern whites and sympathetic Northerners drew to sustain their activities. Through the Butler family, Ames had availability to Grant, and increasingly attempted to convince the President of the necessity of returning order to Mississippi. Grant, however, was receiving criticism from several sectors for keeping Reconstruction troops in southern states, and delayed his decisions time and again.

     The final result—one which Ames could foresee and which ended in his own despondency and determination to withdraw from politics and government service—was the repudiation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth constitutional amendments and the resultant refusal of the country at large to recognize any positive results from Reconstruction. The failure in Mississippi, moreover—the waves of violence against blacks and intimidation of black voters—became the blueprint for Southern racist behavior throughout the region. With the election of Rutherford Hayes and his abandonment of Reconstruction, the white South was free for more than a century to return—if not to outright slavery—to the societal injustices against blacks for which the Civil War had been fought.          

     Grant’s decision not to protect the Mississippi black voters of 1875 resulted in staggering consequences and had effects not just upon Southern blacks but upon all voters throughout the US that reach out to each of our lives today. As Lemann repeatedly demonstrates (and my only quibble with the author might be his understandable restatement of these issues several times throughout the book), Reconstruction was soon after seen as a terrible and wrong-headed endeavor, despite what Lemann reveals about its wonderful early effects on black voting and empowerment, and the possibilities—educational and economic—which Ames imagined for Southern blacks. The author shows how even noted historians and critics of the early 20th century—relying on popular sentiment and mistaken accounts, while ignoring major texts such as the Boutwell Report, black narratives, and the Ames’ letters—presented a revisionist history of the South, supported by Southern fiction (such as that by Thomas Dixon) in which Reconstruction is pilloried.

       In fact, the South won what the author describes as this “last battle” of the War, a concept of Redemption—with all its religious connotations—replacing the Republicanist hope that whites and blacks might live and work together in a new social order.

       In a sense, I now feel that—influenced as I was by the sophisticated history of W. J. Cash—my own accounts of the various Southern mythologies only helps to promulgate the revisionist notions. While my argument has little to do directly with Reconstruction, and I do not use the support of virulent fictions such as Dixon’s, in the end each of the layers of mythological veneer applied to Southern values and lifestyles was part of a series of lies the South told to the North and to itself to support what Faulkner argued throughout much of the 20th century was at the heart of things: the fear and hatred of the black race by both North and South.

      If Lemann has done nothing else—and his reassessment of Reconstruction ideals is of far more importance—he has at least redeemed the life of Adelbert Ames, who was represented in later years as an ineffectual leader and, more often, as an evil carpetbagger. Ames, who lived into his nineties, dying in 1933, certainly had been given reason for cynicism, but seemingly stolidly lived on, raising a notable family that included a scientist, Adelbert Ames, Jr. and the noted suffragist Blanche Ames Ames [sic]. Tending to his family flour mills in Fort Atkinson, Iowa and Northfield, Minnesota, Ames one day encountered, by accident, the daring raid by the gangs of Jesse James and Cole Younger on the Northfield bank, and helped other citizens in preventing the robbery and routing the attackers. Later shot and imprisoned, Younger admitted that he and James, ex-Confederate soldiers, had specifically chosen that bank because it was owned by “Beast Butler” (reviled by Southerners for his administration of New Orleans) and held the money of Adelbert Ames.

     The day after reading this passage in Lemann’s book, I turned on the television only to be faced with the 1972 movie, The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid. In the mode of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Philip Kaufman’s film presents a Western sympathetic to the outlaw point-of-view. After reading Lemann’s account of black murders and harassment by just the kind of men James and Younger represented, I had difficulty in sharing what Kaufman clearly hoped to represent as the comic humanity of these seemingly happy-go-lucky resisters of the establishment. Just as I had come to perceive the dangers in my own presentation of myths, I found little sympathy in the new myths Kaufman attempted to weave (or unweave) before my eyes.

     It is telling that John F. Kennedy—the president best known for advocating the Civil Rights bill (a bill eventually passed under the administration of successor, Lyndon Johnson) and who accomplished just what Grant had refused to do by sending federal troops to Mississippi—fell under the sway of the misrepresentations of Ames’ Mississippi tenancy in his renowned Profiles in Courage. In that Pulitzer Prize-winning book he writes, “No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi,” citing Ames, the son-in-law of the “butcher of New Orleans,” as having raised taxes to fourteen times its previous level and allowing the state lay in ruin—factually wrong assessments. Ames’ daughter, named, after her mother, wrote Kennedy several times, demanding that he look into the history and change his observations, all to no avail. At one point Kennedy turned to his friend George Plimpton, attending a White House affair, begging Plimpton—the great, great grandson of Adelbert and Blanche Ames—to intercede, to ask his aunt Blanche to “cease and desist” her seemingly incessant letter writing.

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2006

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2008).