Between 1867 and 1877, more than three thousand free African Americans and their white allies were killed in cold blood by terrorist organizations in the South.

Over the years this fact would not only be forgotten, but a series of exculpatory myths would arise to cover the tracks of this orchestrated campaign of atrocity and violence. Little memory would persist of the simple truth: that a well-organized and directed terrorist movement, led by ex-Confederates who refused to accept the verdict of Appomattox and the enfranchisement of the freedmen, succeeded in overthrowing the only freely elected, representative governments that the Southern states would know for a century to come.

In The Bloody Shirt, Stephen Budiansky brings to life this largely forgotten but epochal chapter of American history through the intertwining lives of five courageous men who dared to resist the violence and keep the dream of freedom and liberty alive. They include James Longstreet, the ablest general of the Confederate army, who would be vilified and ostracized for insisting that the South must accept the terms of the victor and the enfranchisement of black men; Lewis Merrill of the 7th Cavalry, who fought the Klan in South Carolina; and Prince Rivers, who escaped from slavery,fought for the Union, became a state representative and magistrate, and died performing the same menial labor he had as a slave.

Using letters and diaries left by these men as well as startlingly hateful diatribes that filled the Southern newspapers after the war, Stephen Budiansky’s The Bloody Shirt vividly brings to life this era—and reminds us that terrorism is hardly new to America.