This is John Bachelor. What follows is an excerpt from a two-hour conversation with the author Robert Swicklich forthcoming in the next weeks of his new book Sheridan's secret mission, how the South Won the War after the Civil War.

Ulysses Grant President sent his good colleague Phil Sheridan, military man, from Chicago,

commanding out of Chicago to New Orleans to supervise to observe to make an

opinion of what at this point looked to be a rising of the defeated Confederates against the idea

of black suffrage in the South.

This moment in a court case against men who had murdered free black men and turning on a decision that was pending.

The larger story of course is the South rising up again and the North trying to rally its forces to defeat the resistance in New Orleans and throughout Mississippi.

Robert Swicklich explaining the context of Sheridan's dispatch to New Orleans for Ulysses Grant in the forthcoming weeks.

Much more of this when we speak at length.

Well... when we speak at Lane. Well, what happened was the in spite of the

Colfax massacre in 1873. The overall situation in the South was becoming more manageable because of the so-called reconstruction amendments, one of which the 14th

amendment appeared to give Congress the ability to more or less police

black rights in the South and they had passed legislation known as the Enforcement Act, which was used to send

federal agents and troops into to defeat the Ku Klux Klan largely in South Carolina.

And so there were the the Colfax massacre represented a kind of,

it was more of an aberration

at the time that it happened,

but there was overall a feeling that things could

could work out in the South if they maintained the enforcement powers of the north of the federal government.

However, the Colfax massacre quickly became a court case and with a lot of the perpetrators of that massacre were arrested and tried.

And during the trial of the Colfax criminals, the Colfax criminals the Colfax terrorists there was an interim verdict which the

defense had raised the possibility that these enforcement acts were unconstitutional.

...