The Garden of Good and Evil

"Freedmen had a fighting chance as long as they could count on the support of the federal government. But Washington’s commitment to racial justice, always tenuous, quickly faded. In the process, revolution gave way to restoration. By the early 1870s African-Americans had been driven out of Savannah’s political life. In the surrounding countryside blacks had been reduced to a largely landless peasantry, eking out meager livings on tiny parcels of rented land. And all along the Georgia coast local officials began to impose systematic segregation, the legalized humiliation that would culminate in Jim Crow."

In The New York Times, Kevin Boyle reviews Jacqueline Jones's Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War.