Interviewed by Herman Belz, Nicholas Lemann discussed his book Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In his book Mr. Lemann says that after the war ended, a second war over the question of rights went on for years. In the American South during Reconstruction, for many whites the word “redemption” took on the meaning of: “a divine sanction for the retaking of the authority the whites had lost in the Civil War, and a heavenly quality to the reestablishment of white supremacy” in which whites would have full, uncontested power over all aspects of the lives of blacks. The South, in this view, was “redeemed” from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution by “political violence” and “defiance of the national government.” He described an armed campaign of racial violence that challenged support for emerging black political power. 

Nicholas Lemann also is a staff writer for The New Yorker.