Paul Krugman: "If America had treated former slaves and their descendants as true citizens, with full protection under the law, we would have expected the legacy of slavery to gradually fade away…. But the corrupt political deal that ended Reconstruction empowered Southern white supremacists who systematically suppressed black gains."
I have always found the period of Reconstruction to be the most tragic in American history. Following the immense bloodshed of the Civil War, the nation's reformers — mostly Radical Republicans — grasped the very real possibility of compensating for our "original sin." Enforced by Union troops, former slaves would be endowed with full sociopolitical equality. The Civil War's necessary carnage would have produced a tremendous good.
Yet, by 1876 the North had tired of reform; it just wanted to get on with the business of booming industrialization — and huge profits. Hence the "corrupt political deal that ended Reconstruction." And rather than "the legacy of slavery gradually fading away," it morphed into Jim Crow, and its historical legacy added another layer of iniquity.
As intellectual victims of racism, white historians in the early 20th-century characterized the Reconstruction South as a the epicenter of corruption and depravity: Lazy, venal black politicians, they wrote in wild exaggerations, especially in American history textbooks, made a mockery of state government with the ignorant, drunken minority having taken control. In fact, states under African-American control were governed quite well, and at any rate, white historians managed to neglect rampant political corruption in the white Gilded Age North.
So here we are, in the Third Reconstruction (the Second being the Civil Rights Era). I often wonder if the legacy of slavery will ever fade away.