Paying the cost of failed Reconstruction.

Henry Mosler's painting "The Lost Cause", depicting an uneducated Southern dupe returning to his destroyed home after having fought for rich Southerners who wanted to keep human beings in barbours slavery.

Two related items:

Tennessee's Redistricting Fight and the Long Shadow of the Civil War

and this one:

The Confederacy rises again

The biggest political mistake the US has ever made was not engage in radical reconstruction after the American Civil War.  To have served in an officer, or frankly even as a volunteer, in the Confederate Army should have been regarded as fully treasonous and never forgiven. Those who did should have been tried and given heavy sentences.  Men like Robert E. Lee should never have been allowed to walk the streets as free men again.  

Slave holders, no matter how small they were, should have had to compensate their former slaves or their decedents heavily.  On the principal that the land belongs to he who works it, a means of transferring agricultural land to the former slaves should have been devised.

This is, I'd note, the second time the country has gone through this Lost Cause crap.  The cause of the Southern States during the Civil War ranks right up with that of Nazi Germany as one of the worst causes people have every fought for.  The South should have been made to hang its head in shame, as the Germans were after World War Two.  And  yet, here we go again.

If there's any good thing about any of this is that the rise of the Lost Cause yielded to the Civil Rights Era.  Americans thought they'd finally one the promise of the country, although Liberals and Progressives certainly took that claimed victory beyond what it meant and should have mean in other ways.  Everyone has been reminded of that, now that the fulfillment of the result of Reagan's Southern Strategy has been afflicted upon the nation in form of the Trump Administration.