White opens with Lincoln's funeral train carrying the body home to Springfield, and with the question the mourning left unsettled: who exactly counted as the People whom the assassin could not kill. Not everyone grieved, and the demand for vengeance narrowed quickly from the South at large to the conspirators.

From there the book treats the three decades to 1896 as a single project rather than a failure followed by an excess. Reconstruction belongs, on this reading, to a longer effort at building a nation on the model Henry Clay had urged — federal money, federal improvements, institutions on a continental scale — an effort ambitious in conception and often unlucky in execution.

Measured against the ideal it began with, a country of self-reliant households in small Protestant towns, what actually arrived was corporations of unprecedented size, troops at Homestead and Pullman, a class of industrial magnates, a Republican party in their service, and the abandonment of racial equality.