Amongst that crowd was to be found Woodrow Wilson, who as a young man impressed all his acquaintances with his dogged adherence to the Southern cause. As the author of best-selling popular histories in the 1880s and 1890s, Professor Wilson concluded his triumphant narrative of the American nation state with a celebration of the reconciliation between North and South, which had condemned Reconstruction and consigned the black population to a disenfranchised underclass.
