Beyond Redemption Summary

One question remained on the minds of those involved with the American Civil War: how can you rebuild a nation that was once hellbent on fighting one another? The idea of Reconstruction was created in hopes of doing just that. However, Reconstruction itself was not cut and dry. In fact, there were so many differing opinions that Reconstruction could not be categorized by any particular main theme. In Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War, Carole Emberton--assistant professor of history at the University of Buffalo--attempts to define the main ideologies surrounding the post-Civil War era by bringing to light how a thirst for violence provided the foundation for the “making of manhood, freedom, and citizenship in the aftermath of one of the most destructive wars” (2). The definition of Reconstruction would come to mean something different to each majority group in the United States, this included northerners, white southerners, and newly freedmen. Each group would use Reconstruction to justify their violence and personal agendas in the years that followed the Civil War, and would produce “a political culture that idealized military valor and sacrifice as the ultimate expression of American citizenship” (9). While exploring this idea of martial manhood, Emberton chooses to emphasize the language that came along with the redemptive era. Redemption--and the violence that seemed to inevitably follow it--was used as a means of offering protection. In the eyes of the freedmen, this protection needed to come from laws and by securing rights for themselves, however, for those who were white southerners and suffering from the backlash of the Civil War, they sought redemption in terms of regaining power due to their “white superiority”. The strongest notion in Beyond Redemption is the idea that “Americans confronted the unsettling possibility that more violence might be necessary in order to ensure the past four years of suffering and death would not have been in vain… redemption from violence easily became redemption through violence” (14). It seems that Emberton attempts to use the idea of violence as the connection between the cultures. While this is true in some cases, one cannot simply categorize all regions to have the same feelings towards the violence that most typically happened in the New South. This simplification of ideologies ignores those who supported newly freedmen throughout the Reconstruction era. Her strength resided in the focus on physical violence and notions of political gain that were made central to the idea of citizenship and manhood. “Voting, like soldiering, became a ritualized performance of manhood” (144). Violence--even just the threat of it-- would come to characterize the nation as a way to become …show more content…
This work provides insight into how one would go about achieving the highest ideals of masculinity and the means of securing one’s political and social status in the post-Civil War America. Emberton solidifies the idea of martial manhood in her discussion on the violence that permeated the lives of those struggling to rebuild after the devastation of war. She best summarizes what the study of not only Reconstruction, but history itself, plainly as “an ongoing process, never complete, always imperfect, and certainly not easy” (216). Beyond Redemption deserves recognition and provides valuable information to scholars of life following the Civil