" To cast the war as something else, as Lincoln did, to shroud that hard, cold reality under the cloak of “preserving the Union” would not and could not address the root causes of the war and the toll that centuries of slavery had wrought. And that failure of clarity led to a failure of humanity. Frederick Douglass later charged that in “the hurry and confusion of the hour, and the eagerness to have the Union restored, there was more care for the sublime superstructure of the republic than for the solid foundation upon which it alone could be upheld”—the full rights of the formerly enslaved people.18 "

― Carol Anderson , White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide