Reconstruction and Redemption

Over at 1945 I build on Dan Byman’s excellent International Security article on Reconstruction and the victory of White Supremacist insurgents:

Byman is not the first to approach Reconstruction and Redemption as a counter-insurgency conflict, but his approach is unusual in terms of framing the conflict in the South in straightforwardly military terms, and in concluding that the US Army suffered a decisive military defeat at the hands of white supremacist insurgents. Most accounts of Reconstruction discuss northern exhaustion and lack of commitment as keys to failure, but few discuss this in the same language that we use to discuss defeat in Vietnam or Afghanistan… Indeed, the current debate over the removal of statues of Confederate military officers usually makes a category error; these statues are less about defeat in the Civil War than victory in Redemption.