Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. This item is unavailable.Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War

"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.

Nicholas Lemann, born in New Orleans in 1954, began his journalistic career there and then worked at Washington Monthly, Washington Post, and Texas Monthly, of which he was executive editor. A frequent contributor to national magazines, he was national correspondent of The Atlantic Monthly and is now a staff writer at The New Yorker. His books include the prizewinning The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991).