Who were the “Redeemers” in American history?
With systematic use of terror - murder and torture - a guerrilla force of so-called Redeemers intimidated black voters and forced the restoration of white supremacist rule in the South. Dismayed by the violence, Northern reformers reasoned, impotently, that blacks had been given the vote and should have been able to protect themselves. To use the power of the Federal Government to protect black lives, the reformers believed, would deprive the blacks of their liberty. Thus, the North backed away from a commitment to equal protection under the law, and the Federal Government failed to contain the violence. Reconstruction came to an end with the Compromise of 1877, which left the Republicans in control of the White House but left the freed people in the hands of the white Redeemers.
NY Times May 1988 review of RECONSTRUCTION America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 by Eric Foner
In short, the “Redeemers” were the White Supremacists who gave birth to the Klan, Jim Crow and the reestablishment of white dominance after Reconstruction — the brief period of hope for change in the South after the Civil War.
And yet, Times columnist David Brooks (B.S., History, University of Chicago) chose to title his most recent column of musings about “unifying” themes in American history, based on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural:
America: The Redeemer Nation
You cannot get more tone deaf than this. Brooks is the Rodney King of political writing, eternally asking “can we all just get along” in the service of his insipid and dangerous “both sides” narrative. In this case, he uses broad and misleading generalizations to suggest the loss of our national story is about “a series of redemptions, of injury, suffering and healing fresh starts.”
Except “redemption,” after the Civil War, meant the return to the South for nearly a hundred years of racism, and all its attendant horrors like lynching, Jim Crow, labor exploitation and incessant violence and fear.
To cram his both-siderist narrative into history, he commits an act of grotesque vandalism against Lincoln and his Second Inaugural Address — one of the greatest, most revered speeches in American History — distorting Lincoln’s words into Brooks’s phony “redemption” narrative by using an ellipsis (“the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.”)
The great Driftglass, always on to Brooks’s grift, parses the deceptive slicing:
“Compare Mr. Brooks amputated interpretation of the Second Inaugural --
“All thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it … Both parties deprecated war.”
-- with Mr. Lincoln's words in their full and original form --
...all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to 'saving' the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to 'destroy' it without war--seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would 'make' war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would 'accept' war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
-- to see for yourself what Mr. Brooks' considers ‘superfluous’.”
Rectification of Names has more brilliant analysis:
The idea that this is a speech about "mutual forgiveness:" is just crazy; Lincoln doesn't suggest that there's anything the Union needs to be forgiven for, and all but says something he'd never have said four years earlier, that God is on the Union side.
Despite Trump and his continuing support in Brooks’s Republican Party, Brooks does not get that the forces Lincoln knew he had to vanquish in 1861 are the same forces animating not just “Trumpism,” but Republicanism for the last 50 years. The motivating force is racism, but racism provides the cover for oppression of all kinds, especially economic.
Only after secession was the South-free Civil War Congress able to pass Land Grant Colleges (the Morrill Act), infrastructure creation (internal improvements) and land opportunity (the Homestead Act). And later, Republicans fought tooth and nail against expansion of opportunity in the New Deal and Great Society. And today, the Republican Party (and not just Trump) seeks to destroy these advances.
Brooks has been and still is on the wrong side of that history
That’s why he creates a fictional “vacuum of moral vision that we see now on the relativist left” to equate with “chauvinism and white identitarianism that we see now on the evangelical right.”
He cannot accept there is only one party, left, right or center, with any moral vision and that’s the Democrats.