Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War Book

I was drawn to this primarily because it's about my great-great-grandfather Adelbert Ames and his tenure as governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction; he had been the subject of a short, unfavorable mention in Profiles in Courage, which the family tried to correct without success, and Lemann, I think, was trying to do what Kennedy wouldn't. (Kennedy wrote favorably about L.Q.C. Lamar, a white Democratic Mississippi politician of the 1870s and '80s who was instrumental in ending Reconstruction; I guess Kennedy thought that would win him votes in the South. I'd hate to think he sincerely thought Lamar was a wonderful fellow.)

At any rate, there was much to learn here about Adelbert Ames, who emerges as well-meaning if someone naive in his attempts to advance the cause of black rights against a white population that had no compunction about resorting to violence. (The whites constantly conjured up the specter of marauding bands of blacks to justify violence; Lemann makes a good case that this was pure invention. For one thing, those supposed marauding bands never managed to harm any of the whites on their raids.) Ames, it's probably fair to say, overestimated the goodwill of the Democrats in assuming that all sides really wanted to avoid violence. He does seem to have genuinely believed in the rightness of what he was doing (the carpetbagger just-in-it-for-money label never really fit), and he was victimized to a significant degree by a lack of political will in Washington to keep Reconstruction going. I hadn't realized exactly how unpopular Reconstruction had become even outside the South by the mid-1870s.

A very narrowly focused, but still fascinating, account of the end of Reconstruction, for those who don't care about the family connection.