Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his new book, “ Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow” (Penguin Press), rightly believes that this argument has special currency in the post-Obama, or mid-Trump, era.
Was there ever a fighting chance for full black citizenship, equality before the law, agrarian reform? Or did the combination of hostility and indifference among white Americans make the disaster inevitable? Instead of arguing about whether the war could have turned out any other way, we argue about whether the postwar could have turned out any other way. Now we think that the aftermath-the confrontation not of blue and gray but of white and black, and the reimposition of apartheid through terror-is what has left the deepest mark on American history.
Not so long ago, the Civil War was taken to be this country’s central moral drama.
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