by Eric Rauchway

You can find defenders of the Confederacy throughout the country--which is peculiar, because you'd think we'd be out of sympathy with reckless men in excessive facial hair who want to kill U.S. citizens and undermine the American republic. But it's much harder, and maybe impossible, to find people willing to defend white Southerners' behavior in the postwar era--they turned to terrorism (yes, they used that word back then) to assert what they quite frankly regarded as their right to white supremacy. Why did they succeed in peace, when they had failed in war? Partly because they committed themselves so zealously to their villainy; partly because the Republican architects of the postwar occupation plan stumbled at the start, and could never afterward recover. You can read a bit more about some recent books on this subject here.