After Appomattox: How the South Won the War

I don't remember when or where I first heard of After Appomattox, by Stetson Kennedy, but I most definitely thought that it examined the North-South cultural divide and, pardon me, but what feels to be the growing presence and influence of southern, and especially southern redneck, culture/values. In other words, Honey Boo Boo, anyone?

I was wrong. After Appomattox is the story of the Reconstruction years, 1865-1876, and how ultimately the North lost the enthusiasm for and interest in the promises made to southern blacks during and immediately after the Civil War. Or, as Kennedy puts it so succinctly, "The nation had evidently made up its mind that, so long as the South remained inside the Union and did not go back into the business of buying and selling blacks, it could do what it damned well pleased with them" (p. 237). Certainly there would be no 40 acres and a mule.

Indeed, After Appomattox is the sobering (and sordid) story of complicity and outright racism at the highest levels of government and the inheritance such individuals bequeathed this country for generations to come. Andrew Johnson, in one of his finer moments (of which there were to be enough for Congress to impeach him), sent a messenger south to inform the generals stationed there that the president was "for a white man's government, and in favor of free white citizens controlling the country" (p. 45). Although General Grant - and later President Grant - fought such men doggedly, the tide of racism throughout the country and into the highest reaches of government was simply too strong. In 1876, in a deal that secured Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency by a single electoral vote, the highest and mightiest in the land reached a deal by where the federal government would, essentially, no longer intercede in state matters. The result, Kennedy notes, was as though it was Grant who had surrendered to Lee at Appomattox and not the other way around. To say nothing of the fact that the deal of '76 also set the stage for nearly a century of the repression of and brutality against blacks.