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Who reconciled? Mainly white officers of both sides. Some enlisted men, not all. Definitely not America, given Jim Crow laws.
Pretending that the Civil War simply solved the issues that caused it overnight is some really lazy & irresponsible thinking.
Reconciliation does not look like black US veterans being assaulted when they returned from WWI, 54 years after the Civil War ended.
I want you to imagine this scene for me: it's early 1917, just after the US has declared war on Germany & Wilson wants unity.
So he not only allows the Sons of Confederate Veterans to meet in DC, he goes to address them, & allows them to march with their flags
Imagine being an African American soldier in the US Army, watching those flags go through your capital's streets- as they never had in war.
So sure, high level whites reconciled. They shook hands, held big reunions where everyone agreed not to discuss the causes of war.
But in the meantime, the country continued to be riven with the same dissensions that caused the war. Reconciliation was code for "forget."
Forget as in, "let's brush our differences under the rug, even tho they remain, in the name of trying to get normalcy."
Reconciliation was in essence an attempt to be a panacea not for the war, but for Reconstruction. It enabled an unReconstructed South.
Bear that in mind next time you hear someone slinging around the "Reconciliation" argument as if the matter was all settled. It's not.
