Blight argues that when the Civil War concluded, the United States had to resolve two issues: reunion between North and South, and race. The United States never bridged the gap between these two problems, and in fact it widened in the 50 years after the war. This widening gap culminated in a white supremacist nation where Black Americans continued the struggle for equal civil and political rights into the 20th century. Moreover, modern controversies, like those surrounding monuments to the Confederacy, trace their origins to the time frame on which Blight focuses his analysis.

Soon after the Civil War’s end, most Republicans retreated from their commitment to political and civil rights for newly emancipated Black Americans. Although slavery was abolished, Black Americans were granted the rights of citizenship, and Black men gained suffrage, the newfound rights that emancipation brought were quickly eroded.

Although moderate Republican President Abraham Lincoln emancipated enslaved peoples in rebel states, much of the Republican commitment to racial justice died with Lincoln’s assassination and the subsequent degeneration of radical Republicanism. Blight notes that most moderate Republicans favored reconciliation which, in time, absorbed Southern, white supremacist ideology. The work of Union veteran and poet Walt Whitman is an early example of this Northern reconciliationism.