The cotton nabobs had made the South a no-go area for the Constitution... - Allen C. Guelzo

Southerners carried out an asymmetrical kind of political warfare that the rest of the country eventually ran out of patience in confronting. We had the West to win, the Pacific Rim to open, a new economy to create, a catastrophic financial panic to overcome, and in the end, dealing with the political insurgencies of disaffected ex-Confederates simply couldn’t compete.

[B]y what inattention these scurrilously racist Republicans installed the first African-American secretary of state and national security advisor, appointed a black Supreme Court justice, elected the first black U.S. senator since Reconstruction, and sent the troops into Little Rock.

It was once said, as a commercial joke, that it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. The same is true in this case, but not as a joke: It’s not nice to fool with history.