The savage south: lessons of an American insurgency.

• Author: Meacham, Jon
• Position: Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War - Book review

Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War By Nicholas Lemann Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24.00

Albert T. Morgan was desperate and on the run. A Radical epublican in Reconstruction-era Yazoo City, Miss., he had managed to get elected sheriff in 1873--briefly, and only after great trouble from local whites who for a time refused to vacate the courthouse. Now, on Sept. 1, 1875, Morgan, who was white himself, was under assault from the White Leagues, armed groups dedicated to overturning the Southern military defeat in the Civil War by campaigns of violence and intimidation. At a public meeting in Yazoo, a town at the edge of the Mississippi Delta, a defiant white opened fire on Morgan, a veteran of the Union army, as he was making a campaign speech. To strike Morgan was to strike a blow against black voting and civil rights. As a bloody melee unfolded, Morgan slipped through a window and, from hiding, wrote the Reconstruction governor of the state, Adelbert Ames. "We must have U.S. troops," Morgan wrote. "Can't we get help from somewhere?" A follow-up letter was even more urgent: "Can nothing be done? I am in great danger of losing my life.... My friend, I fought four years; was wounded several times; suffered in hospitals, and as a prisoner; was in twenty-seven different engagements to free the slave and save our glorious Union--to save such a country as this!"

The ultimate answer from President Grant's Washington about whether federal troops could establish order and enforce the laws--laws that would have allowed blacks to vote--was depressing and epochal: No. As usual, politics was paramount: Grant later recalled that Ohio Republicans prevailed on him to hold off from intervening in state affairs to placate national Republican sentiment for a limited national government. And so the terrorists the word is chosen with care--won.

Tragically, of course, Morgan's plea for help from the federal government to right racial wrongs in the South was one that would be repeated for nearly a century. The cry from the darkness of Yazoo would be most fully answered, I suppose, 90 years later, when, in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon B. Johnson told Congress that God would favor the undertaking he proposed: a federal Voting Rights Act. While the story of Selma is well known--and 1965 is rightly celebrated as a high-water mark of American liberty--1875 never makes the roll call of crucial years in the American story. (It is, to say the...