Historians often write of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as if they were separate and consecutive eras, but the two gestated together. Actual Reconstruction considerably scaled back the vaunting ambitions of the most radical of the Republicans. It denied rights and protections to other men and all women even as it guaranteed them to white and black men, but still the audacity of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution that ended slavery, granted citizenship, and gave the vote to ex-slaves remains inspiring. Rarely have Americans moved so boldly or so
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