David W. Blight, historian, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 2001 Americans faced an overwhelming task after the Civil War and emancipation: how to understand
the tangled relationship between two profound ideas—healing and justice [T]hese two aims
never developed in historical balance. One might conclude that this imbalance between outcomes
of sectional healing and racial justice was simply America's inevitable historical condition. ..
But theories of inevitability... are rarely satisfying. ... The sectional reunion after so horrible a
civil war was a political triumph by the late nineteenth century, but it could not have been achieved
without the resubjugation of many of those people whom the war had freed from centuries of
bondage. This is the tragedy lingering on the margins and infesting the heart of American history
from Appomattox to World War I.