Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann

Author:Nicholas Lemann [Lemann, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2007-08-21T07:00:00+00:00

As soon as the peace conference had been successfully concluded, however, and the happy result instantly communicated, by telegraph and newspaper, to an eagerly curious nation, Ames’s mood changed. First he was defensive about the criticism that was sure to come, from Negroes in Mississippi and from such Radical Republicans as there still were outside the state. As he put it, “My dread is that I fear somebody will think I have ‘sold out.’” He told Blanche that the deal he had made wasn’t actually as favorable to the Democrats as most people believed. He still had the weapons (now stored in armories), and he could still call up the Negro militias in the event of new troubles. And Albert Morgan, though publicly the most forceful possible advocate of confrontation (“No Compromise,” he had written Ames on the day of the peace conference), had privately come to Ames and said he would not return to Yazoo City with the Negro militia because he would surely be killed—hardly an unreasonable expectation. So Ames could not order the action that the Democrats were most eager for him not to undertake.

Ames believed it possible that somebody might be opening and reading his letters to his wife, so he occasionally hinted to Blanche that he knew things he couldn’t commit to paper. One early hint had been about his knowledge of a plan for a general massacre of the Negro militias, of Albert Morgan, and of himself that was to take place if the peace conference was not successful. Ames had bravely faced death many times before, and had regularly received death threats while governor, but he may have felt that his superiors had now lost their right to presume upon his courage. In any case, the peace conference took him momentarily from being unerringly bleak in his perception of the situation in Mississippi to being gauzily optimistic. On October 16 he wrote to Pierrepont, “Through the timely and skillful intervention of Mr. G. K. Chase, a bloody revolution has been averted … I write this letter chiefly to thank you for sending here a gentleman who has succeeded in inspiring us all with confidence, and who by his wisdom and tact has saved the state from a catastrophe of blood.” Even to Blanche he wrote, “The indications now are that we will have a fair election.”

In the wake of the peace conference, the incidents of White Line violence around the state abated. Mississippi’s Negroes returned to the fields and brought in the cotton crop. A letter from Attorney General Pierrepont reported that the president and the entire Cabinet were gratified at the news of the wise and judicious course Ames had chosen to pursue, and that he himself thought it would be admired in the North. “You may feel assured that this Department will be always ready to aid you in any lawful way to preserve order, and to give the right to every citizen to vote as he pleases.”

Just after the peace

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