During Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, many Northerners looked down on the former rebels with the expected enmity of former foes, and they were often optimistic about the future of African Americans. But that changed, as historian Nina Silber has written, when, “increasingly, northern whites bowed to the racial pressures of reunion.” Northerners began to “overlook the history of American slavery, and came to view the southern blacks as a strange and foreign population,” while at the same time adopting a tender attitude toward the idea of Southern manliness. These changing
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