Bloody Shirt, The: Terror after Appomattox by Stephen Budiansky Paperback Book

Details

Rent Bloody Shirt, The: Terror after Appomattox

Author: Stephen Budiansky

Narrator: Phil Gigante

Format: Unabridged-CD

Publisher: Brilliance Corporation

Published: Jan 2008

Genre: History - United States - Reconstruction Period (1865-1877)

Retail Price: $34.95

Discs: 8

Synopsis

From 1866 to 1876, more than three thousand free African Americans and their white allies were killed in cold blood by terrorist organizations in the South.

Over the years this fact would not only be forgotten, but a series of exculpatory myths would arise to cover the tracks of this orchestrated campaign of atrocity and violence. Little memory would persist of the simple truth: that a well-organized and directed terrorist movement, led by ex-Confederates who refused to accept the verdict of Appomattox and the enfranchisement of the freedmen, succeeded in overthrowing the freely elected representative governments of every Southern state.

Stephen Budiansky brings to life this largely forgotten but epochal chapter of American history through the intertwining lives of five courageous men who tried to stop the violence and keep the dream of freedom and liberty alive. They include James Longstreet, the ablest general of the Confederate army, who would be vilified and ostracized for insisting that the South must accept the terms of the victor and the enfranchisement of black men; Lewis Merrill of the 7th Cavalry, who fought the Klan in South Carolina; and Prince Rivers, who escaped from slavery, fought for the Union, became a state representative and magistrate, and died performing the same menial labor he had as a slave. Using letters and diaries left by these men as well as startlingly hateful diatribes published in Southern newspapers after the war, Budiansky proves beyond a doubt that terrorism is hardly new to America.

View descriptions at Amazon.com

Reviews

BookLender review by William on 2013-03-18 23:08:35

What a dreadful chapter in American history. I knew that the Reconstruction Era was unpleasant, but it is even more painful than I thought to learn the specifics. And it is especially unfortunate that a person General Butler tried so hard to stanch racism only to be impeded and derailed by expedient politicking. The narration itself is clear but overly dramatic, hence the threestar rating.