Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction Book

The most pertinent statement in this book appears in the epilogue - "The Confederate States of America lost the Civil War militarily and economically, but in the ways that mattered most to white Southerners--socially, politically, and ideologically--the South itself did not." Charles Lane begins his book with a narrative of what lead up to the Colfax Massacre and the Massacre itself. While this is a moderate portion of the book, he goes on to cover the attempts to arrest and bring to trial the perpetrators of the Massacre and the travesty of the justice system which were the trial(s) of these individuals and the Supreme Court case that let the criminals go 'unwhipped by justice.' From this book one can ascertain two major figures who allowed, nay, destined, "reconstruction" to fail--President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee fame and Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley. On their souls rest the innumerable lynchings, murders and other mayhem used to intimidate the freedmen in the South. Savagery was used to keep them from exercising their right to vote and to keep them in essentially little more than slave status.