A narrative account of Reconstruction-era violence documents vigilante attacks on African Americans and their white allies, in an analysis that traces the period through the careers of two Union officers, a Confederate general, a northern entrepreneur, and a former slave.

A century after Appomattox, the civil rights movement won full citizenship for black Americans in the South. It should not have been necessary: by 1870 those rights were set in the Constitution. This is the story of the terrorist campaign that took them away. Nicholas Lemann opens his extraordinary new book with a riveting account of the horrific events of Easter 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where a white militia of Confederate veterans-turned-vigilantes...