ANY HISTORIANS HAVE described Reconstruction as a lost moment when the White loyal citizenry abandoned a commitment to provide full political and social equality to freedpeople. This interpretation generally relies on an analytical framework within which the war began as a struggle to restore the Union, turned into a fight that elevated emancipation to an equivalent war aim, and, after the Confederacy collapsed, positioned the nation to press on toward racial equality. Failure to fulfill the last of these goals, goes a common argument repeated in Henry Louis Gates’ PBS documentary , allowed a moment of national promise to slip away, doomed formerly enslaved
