The defeat of the Confederacy, despite all the elegiac language about “a new birth of freedom,” had not changed the meaning or the goal of the Second.12 The anti-Blackness that undergirded slavery, that had made it possible, and that sustained it for centuries still remained strong and unrepentant in post–Civil War America.13 And the hard-fought-for change in the legal status of Black people could not scramble the DNA, the operating principles of anti-Blackness.
