Description:
In the months after the end of the Civil War, there was one word on everyone's lips: redemption. From the fiery language of Radical Republicans calling for a reconstruction of the former Confederacy to the petitions of those individuals who had worked the land as slaves to the white supremacists who would bring an end to Reconstruction in the late 1870s, this crucial concept informed the ways in which many people-both black and white, northerner and southerner-imagined the transformation of the American South.
Beyond Redemption explores how the violence of a protracted civil war shaped the meaning of freedom and citizenship in the new South. Here, Carole Emberton traces the competing meanings that redemption held for Americans as they tried to come to terms with the war and the changing social landscape. While some imagined redemption from the brutality of slavery and war, others-like the infamous Ku Klux Klan-sought political and racial redemption for their losses through violence. Beyond Redemption merges studies of race and American manhood with an analysis of post-Civil War American politics to offer unconventional and challenging insight into the violence of Reconstruction.
Brief description: Carole Emberton is associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo.
Review Quotes: "A deeply researched and ambitious combination of political and cultural history, Beyond Redemption is a powerful and searching exploration of the violent aftermath of the Civil War in the Deep South. Carole Emberton's dedication to telling individual stories and her discussion of the multiple meanings of the suffering bodies of the freed people puts terror and its markers at the center of Deep South politics in this era. At the same time, her dissection of the evolving relationship of federal and state power in the aftermath of a nationalizing war, and her entry-point to this discussion--collective and individual violence--are original and illuminating. Her assertion that 'pity and citizenship were incompatible' provokes an intriguing question that almost no political historian would think to ask."--Jane Dailey "author of Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Post-Emancipation Virginia"