Book Review: Lessons from Reconstruction for Libertarians: Betrayal and Illusion in the Struggle for Real Equality<em> No Easy Walk to Freedom: Reconstruction and the Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment</em> by James E. Bond

With regard to the struggles of the newly freed slaves, Dean Bond's study of the Reconstruction legislatures endorses the views of contemporary historians. These historians do not blame the freedman for failure to forge lasting instruments of liberation, instruments that might have transformed the formal equality promised by emancipation into a social order free of the stigmatizing racial oppression upon which American slavery, segregation, and racial oppression has been premised. Diligently researched and written, the book is of significant interest because of the coincidence of the author's empathy with Afro-Americans and his unwavering and unequivocal affirmation of racial equality, principles which comfortably coexist with his political conservatism. Regrettably, however, his principled conservatism overlaps and sometimes embraces the very arguments that have traditionally and persistently been mounted to maintain the "out-caste" status of Americans of African descent.