We live in a cynical age. - Allen C. Guelzo

[F]or all the economic destruction levied on the South by the war, the people who ran the economic show before the war were still running it afterwards. Former slaveholders were thus free to use cotton profits to maintain a version of the plantation system and force the freedpeople into peonage; peonage, in turn, gave white Democrats the power to control black voting...

What we see in Lincoln is a collection of the virtues we think are most important in a democratic leadership.

Reconstruction should be considered as a "bourgeois revolution."