Important stuff

Rico buys books all the time, and sometimes he gets more than he anticipated. Redemption is just such a book. His original premise was, as the subtitle of the book says, to investigate "The Last Battle of the Civil War", which took place, according to the cover, in 1874, when whites rose up to put down some 'uppity nigras' in Mississippi.
But there's more to it than that, of course.
You'll find a lot of famous names in this book, including President U.S. Grant, Adelbert Ames (a former Union general), Jefferson Davis, and a host of other Civil War notables.
But there's a lot of history that even a historian like Rico didn't know, mostly about the failure of Reconstruction. The central figure is Adelbert Ames, a war hero who fought to preserve the Union, despised abolitionists, and (at first) considered African-Americans an inferior race. Appointed provisional governor of postwar Mississippi, he is horrified at the violence that whites, a minority in the state at the time, use against blacks trying to vote. As military commander, he provides enough security to ensure a Republican victory in the state elections of 1869 (blacks voted Republican until the 1930s), became an advocate of civil rights, and was elected senator in 1870 and governor in 1873.
In July, 1874, A. K. Davis, the-then lieutenant governor of Mississippi and, amazingly, a black man, wrote to President Grant that "armed bodies of men are parading the streets" of Vicksburg and the authorities are "utterly unable to protect the lives and property of the citizens", by which he meant, primarily, black citizens.
Grant, lamentably, does not show well here; he fumbled the use of Federal troops to put down an obvious insurrection, and allowed black rights, including the right to vote, to be eroded by state legislatures dominated by unreconstructed whites.
Rico says he learned a lot about Americans and American history from this book, and advises you to go out and buy a copy today; whether you're interested in Civil War history or not, there are things that occurred back then that are resonating through our national life to this very day. (Barack Obama, for one, would not be a candidate were it not for Adelbert Ames and a myriad others.)