(How the ending collapses)
Purpose:
Show failure as retreat, not sudden betrayal.
Focus:
- Northern political exhaustion
- Federal withdrawal framed as restraint
- Violence as a counter-institution
- Restoration of prewar elites
- Citizenship without protection
- Economic dependency (sharecropping, land concentration) replacing slavery
Key framing:
Stability is chosen over settlement.
What this part locks in:
An unfinished ending.
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