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In which the racist violence of Reconstruction is recast as the American origin mythos
- In short order federal troops arrived and freed the state’s 250,000 enslaved people. It’s difficult to overstate the horror this provoked among many white Texans. Here they were, having lost no major battles on their own soil, a conquered people. The economy lay in ruins; without slavery, the only serious business, cotton, withered. And now blue-coated soldiers, many of them Black, were suddenly everywhere.