 Boris Bittker made a similar suggestion. His main argument is that had the goals of Reconstruction not been foiled by the “political settlement of 1877” and the network of Jim Crow laws not been introduced and finally fully authorized by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 the “only identifiable residue of slavery today would have been cultural”, and the descendants of U.S. slaves and the descendants of U.S. slaveholders would lead the same lives (Bittker 2003: 12, 13). In other words, Bittker seems to go a little further than the first one, suggesting that the legacy of U.S. slavery would have disappeared completely if the U.S. government had protected the rights of the freed people and their descendants, the second line of reasoning too concludes that any responsibility for the legacy of slavery that persists today must be attributed to post Civil War governments.