Redemption and Redeemers

Bee

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Asst. Regtl. Quartermaster Gettysburg 2017
Joined
Dec 21, 2015
A relatively new word has been added to my Civil War lexicon over the last year: Redemption (Redeemers) Until tonight, I really did not have a handle on what the word actually meant, and who it exactly referred to. I am offering up a bit of what I have discovered, thinking that there might be others who reside a bit in the dark, regarding this term.

I did view this often contentious thread that included Redeemers in the OP, however, it deteriorates into ranting, opinion, and the usual polarity. I did not find it useful for a straight forward approach to my query: https://civilwartalk.com/threads/carpetbaggers-scalawags-freedmen-and-redeemers.143442/

Reconstruction vs. Redemption (article)

By 1873, many white Southerners were calling for “Redemption” – the return of **** and the removal of rights for blacks – instead of Reconstruction. This political pressure to return to the old order was oftentimes backed up by mob and paramilitary violence, with the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Red Shirts assassinating pro-Reconstruction politicians and terrorizing Southern blacks. Within a few years, Northern attentions were consumed by apathy and fatigue and the South slipped back toward many of the patterns of the antebellum era. So dire was the situation that historian W. E. B. DuBois described the period as one where “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” https://www.neh.gov/news/reconstruction-vs-redemption


Redemption 1877

Regardless of the direct cause of the end of Reconstruction, by 1877 it was thought to be over; the Redeemers were thought to have overturned Reconstruction and returned the South to its pre-war hierarchical system. In North Carolina specifically, by 1871 the Democratic-controlled legislature impeached Republican Governor William W. Holden, and by 1877 gained control over both the executive and legislative branches of government in the state. According to Paul Escott, with the gains of the 1876 state campaigns “Reconstruction had been overthrown. The brief period of change that had begun to modify a conservative social structure was over…North Carolina had been returned to aristocratic control, and it was not surprising that the democratic forms of government initiated by Reconstruction lived on in full vigor only briefly.” (Escott 1985, 169) North Carolina had been Redeemed. https://cwnc.omeka.chass.ncsu.edu/exhibits/show/second-redemption/redemption--1877


Redemption in Georgia

In the context of southern politics, the term Redemption refers to the overthrow or defeat of Radical Republicans (white and black) by white Democrats, marking the end of the Reconstruction era in the South. In addition to its biblical allusions, the term also underscores the widely held belief among white southerners of that era that the Republican state regimes that ruled during Reconstruction had been inefficient and corrupt, and that the "Redeemers" who reestablished white Democratic control of the state also restored effective and honest government. In recent years historians have come to avoid the term because of both the bias it suggests and the very different way in which modern scholars interpret the overthrow of Reconstruction. In Georgia, Redemption became complete when Governor James M. Smith took office in January 1872. To an even greater extent than in other southern states, Redemption in Georgia ushered in a long period of Democratic dominance in state politics: for the next 131 years, every governor of Georgia would be a Democrat. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/redemption


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Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War

by Nicholas Lemann

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.https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374530696/?tag=civilwartalkc-20
 
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