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BOOK REVIEWS 96 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Beyond Redemption Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War Carole Emberton What is the meaning of the title Beyond Redemption? Has Carole Emberton written a history of counterrevolutionary violence, the meaning of “Redemption” popularized by white conservatives? Recent literature has, in a spirit of irony, surrendered the term to the conservatives who claimed it more than a century ago (while the earlier “Dunning School” of Reconstruction historians endorsed white supremacist claims wholeheartedly). Or does she counter that their South could not be redeemed? Emberton has done neither, choosing instead to reclaim the word “redemption” from its seemingly permanent southern context. As a word heavily laden with christological significance, Emberton is unwilling to leave it in the custody of a decidedly unchristian moment in American history. Beyond Redemption may not seek to redeem redemption so to speak, because the word, the very concept, cannot be dissociated from brutality and pain. The white southern “redemption…should not be understood as a perversion of true Christian or democratic values,” but rather it “entailed a deep ambivalence about violence” (4). Like many Reconstruction histories of recent decades, Emberton’s understanding of “redemption” requires the restoration of black southerners to the narrative. Violence represented an essential element of the nineteenth century republic, though it simultaneously posed a threat to the public good. It had special import in the antebellum South where slavery required it as maintenance . After 1865 white southerners’ fear of an impending “race war” grew, but many northerners feared it too, even those Republicans who saw black male citizenship as the South’s only possibility for future stability after the “hard war” had unleashed a torrent of apolitical violence in the northern states (28). There followed a longstanding northern preoccupation with the suffering of black southerners that ultimately “linked the antebellum and postbellum worlds” and diminished the possibility of racial equality . “In both eras,” Emberton argues, “images of beaten, raped, and terrorized back bodies” simultaneously “demanded white sympathy and reinforced the social distance between those empowered middle class and elite whites at which such images were targeted.” Ultimately, these images convinced northerners that these “objects of pity” (39) could only achieve personhood through pain, with readers implicitly understanding that white Americans did not share the redemption process. “The political commodification of black bodies in pain,” seen in the pages of Harper’s during the pivotal 1868 election, successfully demanded northern sympathy for black southerners , but at the cost of any immediate hope for respect (52). The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and the Freedmen’s Bureau’s leadership, Generals Clinton Fisk and Oliver O. Howard, motivated by a strange combination of benevolence and fear toward their African American charges, further tempered the meaning of black freedom. The black citizen-soldier fared little better than his Harper’s portrayal. History offered many precedents for turning slaves into combatants, but few for making them citizens. The opportunity to live and die by rifle fire—an opportunity afforded only to men—did not guarantee the fulfillment of the citizen-soldier ideal when whites feared an armed black population. This, however, BOOK REVIEWS WINTER 2013 97 did not stop black southern men from embracing an “equation of freedom with fighting” in the 1870s (140). In one of her stronger conclusions, Emberton asserts that their relative success in selfdefense inspired violent white southern resistance; in her telling, the latter was revolutionary rather than counterrevolutionary. On the other hand, Emberton’s suggestion that white conservative violence represented an extension of an old tradition of Democratic Party hooliganism remains less convincing. By 1868 the Democracy was no longer General Andrew Jackson’s party, and by the time the Democratic Party achieved “redemption ” in the late 1870s it no longer resembled Horatio Seymour’s party, at least not in the South. Regardless, white northerners, and even the small number of white southerners who supported black citizenship, could not adjust to the possibility of an armed, potentially militant, black population . But southern conservatives eventually took command of the violence, not only physically. Publicity surrounding massacres of black southernersleadinguptothenation ’scentennialinspired “martial performances of Southern manhood and the brutalization of black bodies enabled whites to envision...

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