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150 years after Civil War, America still searches for racial redemption

Carole Emberton

A new book by UB historian Carole Emberton looks at how the Reconstruction era shaped the attitudes of Southerners today. Photo: Douglas Levere


Published July 25, 2013

“Redemption is an ongoing process.”
Carole Emberton, assistant professor
Department of History



Emberton says that at the end of the Civil War, the principal concern of Southern freedmen was their redemption from lives of slavery. Some looked forward to a fresh start as new citizens and land owners, and to the peace they hoped would mark the post-war era.

What they found, instead, was continued violence, bigotry and political oppression.





“This ultimately led to the rise of a violent form of white supremacy, a larger culture of gun ownership and the defeat of Reconstruction itself,” she says.

During the Reconstruction period, even as black Americans sought redemption through the exercise of their electoral rights, many white Southerners were unable to tolerate being policed by federal troops—some of which included black soldiers—and tried to create their own form of redemption by reasserting their dominance over the land they once controlled though a political coalition called the Redeemers. The Redeemers was a southern wing of the conservative faction of the Democratic Party, which at the time opposed many of the era’s civil rights reforms.


Southern whites used the barrel of a gun to beat back change and in order for former slaves to defend their new rights—and sometimes their lives—it was imperative that they, too, arm themselves. Emberton points out that guns were anything but scarce. American weapons manufacturing exploded to fuel the Civil War, and to maintain production and profit, the leading manufacturers—Colt, Smith and Wesson, Springfield and Winchester—needed a new market.


“If you want to vote you had to be armed because the other side is armed,” she says. “It was a militarized political culture where everyone brought their guns to the voting booths.”

This culture provoked fear of crime as well, Emberton says. It instilled in white Southerners the belief that men needed to protect their homes and families from the violence they saw as rampant right outside their doors. Although whites were largely responsible for creating this culture of violence, they blamed freed people for it. These fears still exist today and often are expressed openly.

