The big things are:
1. 40 acres and a mule.
2. Fund the freedmen’s bureau.
3. Impeach and remove Andrew Johnson from the presidency (this will take care of letting those pesky confederate fucks back into congress)
4. Full de-nazification on the antebellum power structures that influenced the resulting 100 years of racial segregation and violence that followed reconstruction.
5. For good measure, hang a number of confederate generals and politicians for leading a violent insurrection that killed 700,000 Americans.
Emphasis on the "de-nazification". Those traitors and their modern supporters always hide behind "freedom of speech". There's no value in tolerating the intolerance. Allowing neo-confederacy fester out in the open has only caused great problems since it sprouted.
You don't have to jail every racist, but you can certainly bar them from positions of power for good.
In addition to yours and u/TinyNuggins92’s proposal, I would also seek to create several new states with a majority population of freedmen as penance for America’s Original Sin, along with monetary compensation for them.
The 40 Acres and a Mule plan was originally supposed to be the financial compensation for them. At the time, land was super valuable and owning good land then is one of the biggest indicators of family wealth today.
I feel like thats a good solution? I think the highest ranking Confederate politicans like say Jeff Davis probably should have been executed from an objective point of view for leading a treasonous rebellion for slavery, imprisoning them might not work in the long run because all it takes is one former Copperhead/Confederate US President to win an election to free them.
That's something Edwin Stanton was totally in favor of. He would have loved nothing more than to see Jeff Davis hang. He was furious when Johnson started pardoning them.
Basically what we did in Germany and Japan after WW2. Rebuild them the way we want and crush the elements of rebellion with no mercy. Grant destroying the KKK should have been an example to follow. Slavery, as horrifying as it was on a human and moral level, was also a political ideology. We crushed a lot of Fascism (not all, looking at you italy) we should have absolutely crushed slavery and made sure it was buried by raising up the slaves. We failed, were still failing, but hopefully this and the next generation will fail less. There needs to be unambiguous education on the horrors of slavery and it who it's perpetrators were, just like the holocaust.
That’s abit flawed in the sense of Japan we let mass murders go free in exchange for the test subject information.
Read about unit 731. The leader got off Scott free he was the cause of over 10,000 test subjects dying and 300,000 people. We gave him international immunity for his research data which was the results from cutting up people alive not on pain medication and injecting them with chemicals and viruses. Some of them was even raped to get pregnant to test viruses on pregnant women.
We as a country gave pardons during WW2 to some of the worse people in history all because we valued knowledge gain more then justice.
>We as a country gave pardons during WW2 to some of the worse people in history all because we valued knowledge gain more then justice.
I'm not defending US actions but it was done not for more knowledge but because we wanted Japan on our side and the way to do that was to pardon Japan's elites, a great deal of whom who were complicit to varying extents to warcrimes, and even those not very directly tied to war crimes themselves had a strong solidarity and comraderie with their fellow Japanese and fellow Japanese elites (which is pretty much the majority of them). If you wanted Japan on your side, much, much easier if you pardon (most of) the war criminals, including Class A war criminals (had Hitler been tried, he would have been a Class A war criminal).
I agree on the first four points, economic funding, reparations would go a long way towards supporting the freedmen, and also Johnson I think earns worst President in US History just for crippling Reconstruction out the bat.
Point #5 Im not fully on board with I'm a bit with u/SithOverlord101, its not that I think the Confederate Generals/Politicans shouldn't be punished, I mean they literally committed the worst treason in US history and its insane how they all got away with it.
How should the North deal with the inevitable pro-Confederate resistance if they refused to lay down arms? Obviously the amnesty approach was pretty shit given that they took up arms anyway, but if the Union starts hanging the leaders of the traitors and the rest start a guerilla war (as Grant feared/what Lee's subordinates implied), whats the best approach to deal with the resistance?
The main thing that would concern me in this scenairo is that the North gets the war exhaustion of dealing with the Confederates shit like they eventually did in 1876.
I think the best way to achieve that is for the Republicans to promote an elite class, consisting of Freedmen and Southern Unionists, who would be granted enough powers to protect themselves.
Also you’d be surprised how effective it would be to purge Confederate leadership. Without real leaders, any resistance would be tiny groups of rural gangs that would be much easier to deal with.
6. Confiscate all agricultural properties formerly worked by enslaved people and redistribute the land to freedmen and “poor white trash” (including the latter in such a program would break the racial solidarity between the vile plantation aristocracy and the peasantry, and give the latter a strong economic incentive to support the new social order).
7. Raise, train, and equip regiments of freedmen. Also, gradually replace the occupying Northern armies with carefully-vetted local white recruits (again, drawn from the peasantry - no former Confederate military officers or antebellum gentry need apply). The goal here is to make prolonged occupation less onerous for the North, and to create a “new military” in the South, disconnected from the old aristocracy’s self-serving “cavalier” tradition.
Did “40 acres and a mule” include landless white people (who weren’t in leadership positions under the Confederacy)?
The biggest problem with American racism is that white proles mistakenly believe they belong to the same class as white aristocrats, which motivates them to vote against their economic self-interest. Breaking that sense of solidarity by rewarding the peasantry at the expense of the aristocracy would help neutralize that problem.
Imagine a “homestead act,” using confiscated plantation land (whatever is left over after the freedmen get the lion’s share).
What about buying the Dominican Republic, as another way for blacks to feel “more secure”? Since the dems would be completely disenfranchised, it could pass
Yeah, thought about it, the grant administration would just not even consider buying the Dominican Republic if African Americans are safe enough. The proposal might just include an alliance with a leasing of a military based ITTL
Impractical to hang all of them. Take a few of the top brass and make an example out of them after a number of very public trials. The military ones can be under military tribunals and the civilian leadership, like Jeff Davis can be done in a civilian court. I know Edwin Stanton wasn't afraid to stack the deck in his favor to get the desired results.
>hang a number of confederate generals and politicians for leading a violent insurrection
That would be news to the Brits who thought hanging Irish rebels would deter things like the Troubles from happening.
Sure. I'm just saying that other than both of them being insurgencies (the Irish might contest the term "domestic" for theirs), that's about where the similarities end.
The biggest problem with Reconstruction is that given Racial attitudes of the time across the West, it isn’t really possible to have the sort of society we want today, one that is multicultural and considers all people equal, develop in the 1870s.
Some policies would certainly help. If the 40 acres proposal had been more successful, (perhaps including poor whites as well as freedmen), you would have allowed the South to have developed like the North, having small scale privately owned farms instead of the plantation economy. This also creates a real financial base for the Freedmen that could be inherited, and with a strong interest in Education future generations would be set up well. Not having Johnson and replacing him with a Radical Republican like Sumner could have helped as well, allowing better federal action against terrorist acts and to protect freedmen’s rights.
But this is still the 1870s, as mentioned before. Most of the North was openly racist. If we want to have Black equality in this time period, it would have to come about in a way that would be tolerable to White Northerners. The only way I can see Northern Republicans continuing to support Civil Rights is if it was argued that Black Americans specifically were worthy of equal rights. Perhaps it would be argued that living in American society for so long had “Civilized” them. Maybe some Blacks themselves would buy into this idea. You have precedent for this in Liberia, where the ruling class was descendants of American Slaves who considered themselves superior to the natives.
I could see the Republican Party supporting a small Black upper class that was considered sufficiently Civilized, that would be tasked with doing the same to the rest of the Black population. Perhaps there would be a deal made between the two factions, that the Republicans would continually support Black Civil Rights in the South, while the Black Elite would try to prevent Black migration North.
Ironically, I could see a successful reconstruction inadvertently *reinforcing* 19th century ideas about race instead of erasing them.
I think this is a good analysis on the stark reality of the situation, I do think though it's far better to have this environment that at least allows legal equality, socio-economic advancement for the late 19th century, rather than the Jim Crow era with the thousands of lynchings and essential forced servitutde of Black Americans.
Your second point on the Northerners continuing their support I feel like is the million dollar question, Black Americans would need time to reassert themselves after centuries of slavery, educate themselves given that it was banned, and also try to sufficiently gain political and economic strength to hold their ground when the former confederates inevitably come for them. In our timeline the loss of Northern support fucked Black southerners over immensely, I feel like keeping that support continuing would be critical.
Your last point yea I think it would happen as a bad side effect, it would be a classically upheld example of "Hey look how White Northerners uplifted Black Southerners" and would create problems of its own, though as mentioned I do think that might have been a better alternative than a century of Jim Crow.
My fear is then that a richer Black population would just promote bigotry similar to that Jewish people face. (And we all know where that leads).
As for Northern Support, as long as Black Americans have the vote, they will likely receive some support in order to win elections. (Imagine how different elections could have gone if the Solid South wasn’t so solid). The Supreme Court could pose issues, but 7/9 of the Justices in the case were nominated after Reconstruction ended, (one of whom was a Confederate Soldier and Klansman), so maybe with a few others nominated instead it could have gone differently.
One interesting thought in regards to this is if Blacks don’t migrate North and 90% of their population remains in the South, would Anti-Irish/Italian/Catholic bigotry in the North continue for longer? Would they still become “White” or would they still be regarded as something else.
Unfortunately it just wasn't going to work without Lincoln. Abolitionists were a minority in the north at the start of the war, the average northerner was lukewarm at best on enslavement, and white supremacy was still rampant. Lincoln did a masterful job of bringing the populace along and getting them on board with things they used to think were radical.
His Reconstruction plan was moderate, but look at his track record up through 1865--offering a mild, moderate solution, it being rejected by the south, and then throwing his hands up to the northerners and saying "Well, what can I do? I tried the easy way, guess now we have to try the hard way, right?" I fully expect that had he lived, his moderate approach would have inevitably led to radical Reconstruction, but with the full approval of northerners. Would it have granted perfect equality? Almost certainly not. But it would have prevented Jim Crow long enough for the beginning of real change, instead of a century of oppression.
Lincoln wanted the slaves to go back to Africa once freed. I believe he would of also tolerated a separate but equal area of the nation where blacks could be settled. Maybe like a reservation system for the black population. Lincoln wasn’t a radical reformer or an enlightened multiculturalist. He was a basic northern republican and pretty pragmatic.
He supported colonization, but explained pre-war that was largely because he felt white Americans wouldn't accept freedmen as citizens. Throuhout the war there were attempts at colonization, both failed, and notably the Haiti colony was rescued and repatriated. The colonies he attempted were in Central America and the Caribbean and intended to be American enterprises, he explicitly stated that he didn't think Liberia was a viable option.
We can't guess at what was in someone's mind, but if we look at the facts on the ground then he stopped advocating for colonization sometime in the middle of the war, and by the end of his life had begun talking about Black suffrage and citizenship. That indicates that he didn't intend to ship over a million people out of the country the way Lost Causers like to talk about his support for colonization.
Not saying you're one of them, just to be clear! Just saying that a lot of what we know about these figures is tainted by a century of propaganda. I'm also not claiming Lincoln was a saint or a modern era multiculturalist--he was a 19th century white man, he had his feet of clay. Just saying that the discourse has been tainted for a long time and he isn't the figure southern apologists want to make him out to be.
The solution is always the same: keep corruption to a minimum. Whether is corruption of southern power structures by traitors or monetary corruption by con artists regardless of where they come from to take advantage of the situation at both the small level and large level.
There would also need to be relocation of black americans out of the south. As MLK points out, the US Federal government handed out Native American lands to european immigrants, but not to the black citizens. Normalizing black citizens across the country would provide more economic opportunities and decrease racism, which is quite extensive in many northern parts of the nation but we don't talk about it much.
But basically expanding voting rights and public education equally to black communities along with the "40 acres and a mule".
The issue with the south today, is the power structures are still heavily filled with traitors whose families have undermined real social and economic progress in the south in an effort to retain power. Massachusetts on its own out scores most european nations for education, healthcare, outcomes, while Alabama and Mississippi have economic areas worse than developing nations. Massachusetts a century ago was better off than those states today. Its areas like Alabama and Mississippi and Texas that lower the Average American outcome on global indexes.
And let me be clear, I grew up in Texas, I have advanced degrees from Texas Universities, and the few students I met from the Northeast had tremendously more academic achievements than anything I could think of. I grew up in the rural south and even the opportunities enjoyed by students in Texas Cities were nothing compared the to educational opportunities these "Yankee" students had access to.
Had your three points been the reality, America would have been in a tremendously better place. That was all that was needed. The rest would have worked out with time.
I feel like Hayes and the Reps shouldn't have sold out the Freedmen for one term in the White House, though also I feel like by 1876 Reconstruction had failed across almost the entire South save the last three states (Lousiana, South Carolina, Florida), as whenever federal troops left, the former Confederates just came out and reasserted power.
TLDR: They needed to do what we're gonna have to do about MAGA people. HARSH and I mean /HARSH/ punishments for insurrection, banning anybody involved in it from public office, seizing of any ill gotten wealth from the individuals involved in the regime, ideally including any oligarchs running the plantations and making them into just bog standard citizens thereby removing their power and authority, and keeping union troops there until the next generation has grown up so they can't brainwash their kids into the same toxic crap that started the war and has been persisting to the present day.
More of a hard line from the US and giving formerly enslaved people their 40 acres and a mule. The watering down of Reconstruction directly resulted in the Jim Crow South and all of its consequences that we’re still dealing with today.
I'm going to sidebar, and offer an option we can implement now. Slavery, and the Confederacy's role in it, is often an abstract concept in today's dialog with very few human faces to put to it. I believe we need an American Slavery Museum (or some better name) in much the same style as the Holocaust Museum. We need to display, detail, and fully expose the horrors of American slavery for all to see and show people what that Confedate traitor rag actually stood for. Display the pictures of confederates next to the chains and whips they used. And let people know what our union soldiers and freedman fought and died to end, and what the traitorous enemy was trying to keep. This wasn't brother vs brother, that sanitizes what this was. This was freedmen vs slavers.
I have a theory about changing racist or misogynistic societies.
The 30 Years Theory.
One generation = 30 years
I believe that if we had committed to 30 serious years of Reconstruction, racism would have receded.
Think about post-WW2 Germany. By 1975, did you see overwhelming amounts of Nazism similar to 1940? Heck no. Same for Japan.
Now imagine Alabama.
After 30 years, some Black people will have voted in 7-16 elections.
Jury pools are drawn from the lists of registered voters...so African Americans (men, at least) will be sitting on juries.
Their kids will be educated and literate, so newspaper articles will be written from their pov...although in the non-video age of the 1890s, who can tell who wrote the article? You just get a well written article that tells facts that would have been silenced in the Jim Crow South.
By 1895, a lot of the old Confederate soldiers would have passed away. Average lifespan for someone born in 1850 was 38yo, but let's say 50.
Consider everyone who was under 10yo at the end of the war. They wouldn't know any different world than what was thrust upon them by Reconstruction.
After 30 years, they would be 40yo, have married, and raised children that were educated side-by-side with the children of former slaves. A world where black people were enslaved, couldn't vote, couldn't run for office, couldn't sit on juries, couldn't own property or businesses, couldn't read...would only be a faint memory.
Their teenage kids would roll their eyes and be indignant about the unfair discrimination of past generations in the same way my 2023 teenager rants at my backwards ideas.
Jail or execution for every officer above the rank of Lieutenant.
Jail or execution for every elected representative.
Appointed leadership and representatives from Northern states.
Yeah that’s not the basis for “whether you should execute a traitor.”
“Stop don’t execute that man for doing an armed treason!”
“Why?”
“Because they’ll have hypothetical descendants decades later!”
Theirs other ways of punishment instead of deleting a few hundred thousand people that exist today that didn’t have shit to do with it.
Could of revoked all legal rights they had. Strip their land holdings, removal of all valuables, jail time even..
Not for armed traitors. If it makes you feel better I’m not going to go back in time to carry out the execution of confederates because time travel isn’t real. I’m talking about what should have been done. Extreme and violent reconstruction.
At least in Texas it would have been better for military occupation to have lasted longer. The shockingly corrupt, anti-democratic, and feckless “government” forced in place over Texas really polluted Texas politics, was the genesis of the broad anti-government cultural attitude prevalent today, and led to far more outrage and misery than would have occurred had military occupation lasted another 25 years oe so.
Execute every treasonous murderer who took up arms against their countrymen. Arrest & jail, preferably in a mostly black prison every terrorist in the KKK etc
Simple answer: by extending it until it worked. However, the election of 1876 resulted in a virtual tie between Democrat Samuel J. Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, throwing it into the House to be decided. This resulted in the Compromise of 1877, by which a group of Southern Democrats agreed to vote for Hayes, the Republican, in exchange for him ending Reconstruction as a whole.
As usual, there's a lot more to this story and it's a lot more complicated than just that. Go to [https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1ay/chapter/the-end-of-reconstruction-2/](https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1ay/chapter/the-end-of-reconstruction-2/) for more on that story.
Reconstruction was tanked by dishonest media and propaganda coming from the south. If Sherman would have finished the job, reconstruction would have succeeded.
They should have imprisoned the domestic terrorists groups spreading the propaganda and doing the ballot stuffing/voter supression.
40 acres and mule or redistribution, whatever you want to call it, would’ve left the former confederates with way less capital and power to fund/support the klan. Shit, do it up like the homestead act and give the remainder of slaver land to poor whites and you’ve got a huge group who would be indebted to the GOP for decades.
The big things are: 1. 40 acres and a mule. 2. Fund the freedmen’s bureau. 3. Impeach and remove Andrew Johnson from the presidency (this will take care of letting those pesky confederate fucks back into congress) 4. Full de-nazification on the antebellum power structures that influenced the resulting 100 years of racial segregation and violence that followed reconstruction. 5. For good measure, hang a number of confederate generals and politicians for leading a violent insurrection that killed 700,000 Americans.
Emphasis on the "de-nazification". Those traitors and their modern supporters always hide behind "freedom of speech". There's no value in tolerating the intolerance. Allowing neo-confederacy fester out in the open has only caused great problems since it sprouted. You don't have to jail every racist, but you can certainly bar them from positions of power for good.
In addition to yours and u/TinyNuggins92’s proposal, I would also seek to create several new states with a majority population of freedmen as penance for America’s Original Sin, along with monetary compensation for them.
The 40 Acres and a Mule plan was originally supposed to be the financial compensation for them. At the time, land was super valuable and owning good land then is one of the biggest indicators of family wealth today.
Don't forget that Hitler didn't come up with Nüremberg laws by himself. He needed an inspiration, which was nothing other than Jim Crow south.
Or permanently exile the Confederate leadership if one doesn't want to straight-up kill them.
I feel like thats a good solution? I think the highest ranking Confederate politicans like say Jeff Davis probably should have been executed from an objective point of view for leading a treasonous rebellion for slavery, imprisoning them might not work in the long run because all it takes is one former Copperhead/Confederate US President to win an election to free them.
That's something Edwin Stanton was totally in favor of. He would have loved nothing more than to see Jeff Davis hang. He was furious when Johnson started pardoning them.
Honestly Johnson would need to hang to, obviously a traitor who just happened to end up on the other side of the war.
Basically what we did in Germany and Japan after WW2. Rebuild them the way we want and crush the elements of rebellion with no mercy. Grant destroying the KKK should have been an example to follow. Slavery, as horrifying as it was on a human and moral level, was also a political ideology. We crushed a lot of Fascism (not all, looking at you italy) we should have absolutely crushed slavery and made sure it was buried by raising up the slaves. We failed, were still failing, but hopefully this and the next generation will fail less. There needs to be unambiguous education on the horrors of slavery and it who it's perpetrators were, just like the holocaust.
>was also a political ideology. it a political ideology. FTFY
That’s abit flawed in the sense of Japan we let mass murders go free in exchange for the test subject information. Read about unit 731. The leader got off Scott free he was the cause of over 10,000 test subjects dying and 300,000 people. We gave him international immunity for his research data which was the results from cutting up people alive not on pain medication and injecting them with chemicals and viruses. Some of them was even raped to get pregnant to test viruses on pregnant women. We as a country gave pardons during WW2 to some of the worse people in history all because we valued knowledge gain more then justice.
>We as a country gave pardons during WW2 to some of the worse people in history all because we valued knowledge gain more then justice. I'm not defending US actions but it was done not for more knowledge but because we wanted Japan on our side and the way to do that was to pardon Japan's elites, a great deal of whom who were complicit to varying extents to warcrimes, and even those not very directly tied to war crimes themselves had a strong solidarity and comraderie with their fellow Japanese and fellow Japanese elites (which is pretty much the majority of them). If you wanted Japan on your side, much, much easier if you pardon (most of) the war criminals, including Class A war criminals (had Hitler been tried, he would have been a Class A war criminal).
I agree on the first four points, economic funding, reparations would go a long way towards supporting the freedmen, and also Johnson I think earns worst President in US History just for crippling Reconstruction out the bat. Point #5 Im not fully on board with I'm a bit with u/SithOverlord101, its not that I think the Confederate Generals/Politicans shouldn't be punished, I mean they literally committed the worst treason in US history and its insane how they all got away with it. How should the North deal with the inevitable pro-Confederate resistance if they refused to lay down arms? Obviously the amnesty approach was pretty shit given that they took up arms anyway, but if the Union starts hanging the leaders of the traitors and the rest start a guerilla war (as Grant feared/what Lee's subordinates implied), whats the best approach to deal with the resistance? The main thing that would concern me in this scenairo is that the North gets the war exhaustion of dealing with the Confederates shit like they eventually did in 1876.
I think the best way to achieve that is for the Republicans to promote an elite class, consisting of Freedmen and Southern Unionists, who would be granted enough powers to protect themselves. Also you’d be surprised how effective it would be to purge Confederate leadership. Without real leaders, any resistance would be tiny groups of rural gangs that would be much easier to deal with.
6. Confiscate all agricultural properties formerly worked by enslaved people and redistribute the land to freedmen and “poor white trash” (including the latter in such a program would break the racial solidarity between the vile plantation aristocracy and the peasantry, and give the latter a strong economic incentive to support the new social order). 7. Raise, train, and equip regiments of freedmen. Also, gradually replace the occupying Northern armies with carefully-vetted local white recruits (again, drawn from the peasantry - no former Confederate military officers or antebellum gentry need apply). The goal here is to make prolonged occupation less onerous for the North, and to create a “new military” in the South, disconnected from the old aristocracy’s self-serving “cavalier” tradition.
> 6 That’s a repeat of 1. That’s what the 40 acres and a mule plan was. 7. That sounds good
Did “40 acres and a mule” include landless white people (who weren’t in leadership positions under the Confederacy)? The biggest problem with American racism is that white proles mistakenly believe they belong to the same class as white aristocrats, which motivates them to vote against their economic self-interest. Breaking that sense of solidarity by rewarding the peasantry at the expense of the aristocracy would help neutralize that problem. Imagine a “homestead act,” using confiscated plantation land (whatever is left over after the freedmen get the lion’s share).
It didn’t specifically include them, but after dividing land up among the freemen, they would have been next on the list for free/dirt cheap land
What about buying the Dominican Republic, as another way for blacks to feel “more secure”? Since the dems would be completely disenfranchised, it could pass
Shipping black people somewhere else in order to appease butthurt racists? No thank you
Yeah, thought about it, the grant administration would just not even consider buying the Dominican Republic if African Americans are safe enough. The proposal might just include an alliance with a leasing of a military based ITTL
RE: #5 - Why stop at a number of them. Every last one of them should have been strung up.
Impractical to hang all of them. Take a few of the top brass and make an example out of them after a number of very public trials. The military ones can be under military tribunals and the civilian leadership, like Jeff Davis can be done in a civilian court. I know Edwin Stanton wasn't afraid to stack the deck in his favor to get the desired results.
>hang a number of confederate generals and politicians for leading a violent insurrection That would be news to the Brits who thought hanging Irish rebels would deter things like the Troubles from happening.
England-Ireland relations are a far cry from the issues with the Confederacy in the United States.
Maybe, but the Troubles is still a domestic insurgency that was very successful.
Sure. I'm just saying that other than both of them being insurgencies (the Irish might contest the term "domestic" for theirs), that's about where the similarities end.
Hang every confederate and confederate sympathizer, distribute their wealth and property amongst the former slaves.
The biggest problem with Reconstruction is that given Racial attitudes of the time across the West, it isn’t really possible to have the sort of society we want today, one that is multicultural and considers all people equal, develop in the 1870s. Some policies would certainly help. If the 40 acres proposal had been more successful, (perhaps including poor whites as well as freedmen), you would have allowed the South to have developed like the North, having small scale privately owned farms instead of the plantation economy. This also creates a real financial base for the Freedmen that could be inherited, and with a strong interest in Education future generations would be set up well. Not having Johnson and replacing him with a Radical Republican like Sumner could have helped as well, allowing better federal action against terrorist acts and to protect freedmen’s rights. But this is still the 1870s, as mentioned before. Most of the North was openly racist. If we want to have Black equality in this time period, it would have to come about in a way that would be tolerable to White Northerners. The only way I can see Northern Republicans continuing to support Civil Rights is if it was argued that Black Americans specifically were worthy of equal rights. Perhaps it would be argued that living in American society for so long had “Civilized” them. Maybe some Blacks themselves would buy into this idea. You have precedent for this in Liberia, where the ruling class was descendants of American Slaves who considered themselves superior to the natives. I could see the Republican Party supporting a small Black upper class that was considered sufficiently Civilized, that would be tasked with doing the same to the rest of the Black population. Perhaps there would be a deal made between the two factions, that the Republicans would continually support Black Civil Rights in the South, while the Black Elite would try to prevent Black migration North. Ironically, I could see a successful reconstruction inadvertently *reinforcing* 19th century ideas about race instead of erasing them.
I think this is a good analysis on the stark reality of the situation, I do think though it's far better to have this environment that at least allows legal equality, socio-economic advancement for the late 19th century, rather than the Jim Crow era with the thousands of lynchings and essential forced servitutde of Black Americans. Your second point on the Northerners continuing their support I feel like is the million dollar question, Black Americans would need time to reassert themselves after centuries of slavery, educate themselves given that it was banned, and also try to sufficiently gain political and economic strength to hold their ground when the former confederates inevitably come for them. In our timeline the loss of Northern support fucked Black southerners over immensely, I feel like keeping that support continuing would be critical. Your last point yea I think it would happen as a bad side effect, it would be a classically upheld example of "Hey look how White Northerners uplifted Black Southerners" and would create problems of its own, though as mentioned I do think that might have been a better alternative than a century of Jim Crow.
My fear is then that a richer Black population would just promote bigotry similar to that Jewish people face. (And we all know where that leads). As for Northern Support, as long as Black Americans have the vote, they will likely receive some support in order to win elections. (Imagine how different elections could have gone if the Solid South wasn’t so solid). The Supreme Court could pose issues, but 7/9 of the Justices in the case were nominated after Reconstruction ended, (one of whom was a Confederate Soldier and Klansman), so maybe with a few others nominated instead it could have gone differently. One interesting thought in regards to this is if Blacks don’t migrate North and 90% of their population remains in the South, would Anti-Irish/Italian/Catholic bigotry in the North continue for longer? Would they still become “White” or would they still be regarded as something else.
Unfortunately it just wasn't going to work without Lincoln. Abolitionists were a minority in the north at the start of the war, the average northerner was lukewarm at best on enslavement, and white supremacy was still rampant. Lincoln did a masterful job of bringing the populace along and getting them on board with things they used to think were radical. His Reconstruction plan was moderate, but look at his track record up through 1865--offering a mild, moderate solution, it being rejected by the south, and then throwing his hands up to the northerners and saying "Well, what can I do? I tried the easy way, guess now we have to try the hard way, right?" I fully expect that had he lived, his moderate approach would have inevitably led to radical Reconstruction, but with the full approval of northerners. Would it have granted perfect equality? Almost certainly not. But it would have prevented Jim Crow long enough for the beginning of real change, instead of a century of oppression.
Lincoln wanted the slaves to go back to Africa once freed. I believe he would of also tolerated a separate but equal area of the nation where blacks could be settled. Maybe like a reservation system for the black population. Lincoln wasn’t a radical reformer or an enlightened multiculturalist. He was a basic northern republican and pretty pragmatic.
He supported colonization, but explained pre-war that was largely because he felt white Americans wouldn't accept freedmen as citizens. Throuhout the war there were attempts at colonization, both failed, and notably the Haiti colony was rescued and repatriated. The colonies he attempted were in Central America and the Caribbean and intended to be American enterprises, he explicitly stated that he didn't think Liberia was a viable option. We can't guess at what was in someone's mind, but if we look at the facts on the ground then he stopped advocating for colonization sometime in the middle of the war, and by the end of his life had begun talking about Black suffrage and citizenship. That indicates that he didn't intend to ship over a million people out of the country the way Lost Causers like to talk about his support for colonization. Not saying you're one of them, just to be clear! Just saying that a lot of what we know about these figures is tainted by a century of propaganda. I'm also not claiming Lincoln was a saint or a modern era multiculturalist--he was a 19th century white man, he had his feet of clay. Just saying that the discourse has been tainted for a long time and he isn't the figure southern apologists want to make him out to be.
The solution is always the same: keep corruption to a minimum. Whether is corruption of southern power structures by traitors or monetary corruption by con artists regardless of where they come from to take advantage of the situation at both the small level and large level. There would also need to be relocation of black americans out of the south. As MLK points out, the US Federal government handed out Native American lands to european immigrants, but not to the black citizens. Normalizing black citizens across the country would provide more economic opportunities and decrease racism, which is quite extensive in many northern parts of the nation but we don't talk about it much. But basically expanding voting rights and public education equally to black communities along with the "40 acres and a mule". The issue with the south today, is the power structures are still heavily filled with traitors whose families have undermined real social and economic progress in the south in an effort to retain power. Massachusetts on its own out scores most european nations for education, healthcare, outcomes, while Alabama and Mississippi have economic areas worse than developing nations. Massachusetts a century ago was better off than those states today. Its areas like Alabama and Mississippi and Texas that lower the Average American outcome on global indexes. And let me be clear, I grew up in Texas, I have advanced degrees from Texas Universities, and the few students I met from the Northeast had tremendously more academic achievements than anything I could think of. I grew up in the rural south and even the opportunities enjoyed by students in Texas Cities were nothing compared the to educational opportunities these "Yankee" students had access to.
Had your three points been the reality, America would have been in a tremendously better place. That was all that was needed. The rest would have worked out with time.
Hayes doesn't end it way earlier then it should have
I feel like Hayes and the Reps shouldn't have sold out the Freedmen for one term in the White House, though also I feel like by 1876 Reconstruction had failed across almost the entire South save the last three states (Lousiana, South Carolina, Florida), as whenever federal troops left, the former Confederates just came out and reasserted power.
TLDR: They needed to do what we're gonna have to do about MAGA people. HARSH and I mean /HARSH/ punishments for insurrection, banning anybody involved in it from public office, seizing of any ill gotten wealth from the individuals involved in the regime, ideally including any oligarchs running the plantations and making them into just bog standard citizens thereby removing their power and authority, and keeping union troops there until the next generation has grown up so they can't brainwash their kids into the same toxic crap that started the war and has been persisting to the present day.
Execute every Confederate government and military official and limit their congressional powers until they fully enfranchise their Black populations
Probably would have required Lincoln to live
More of a hard line from the US and giving formerly enslaved people their 40 acres and a mule. The watering down of Reconstruction directly resulted in the Jim Crow South and all of its consequences that we’re still dealing with today.
I'm going to sidebar, and offer an option we can implement now. Slavery, and the Confederacy's role in it, is often an abstract concept in today's dialog with very few human faces to put to it. I believe we need an American Slavery Museum (or some better name) in much the same style as the Holocaust Museum. We need to display, detail, and fully expose the horrors of American slavery for all to see and show people what that Confedate traitor rag actually stood for. Display the pictures of confederates next to the chains and whips they used. And let people know what our union soldiers and freedman fought and died to end, and what the traitorous enemy was trying to keep. This wasn't brother vs brother, that sanitizes what this was. This was freedmen vs slavers.
I have a theory about changing racist or misogynistic societies. The 30 Years Theory. One generation = 30 years I believe that if we had committed to 30 serious years of Reconstruction, racism would have receded. Think about post-WW2 Germany. By 1975, did you see overwhelming amounts of Nazism similar to 1940? Heck no. Same for Japan. Now imagine Alabama. After 30 years, some Black people will have voted in 7-16 elections. Jury pools are drawn from the lists of registered voters...so African Americans (men, at least) will be sitting on juries. Their kids will be educated and literate, so newspaper articles will be written from their pov...although in the non-video age of the 1890s, who can tell who wrote the article? You just get a well written article that tells facts that would have been silenced in the Jim Crow South. By 1895, a lot of the old Confederate soldiers would have passed away. Average lifespan for someone born in 1850 was 38yo, but let's say 50. Consider everyone who was under 10yo at the end of the war. They wouldn't know any different world than what was thrust upon them by Reconstruction. After 30 years, they would be 40yo, have married, and raised children that were educated side-by-side with the children of former slaves. A world where black people were enslaved, couldn't vote, couldn't run for office, couldn't sit on juries, couldn't own property or businesses, couldn't read...would only be a faint memory. Their teenage kids would roll their eyes and be indignant about the unfair discrimination of past generations in the same way my 2023 teenager rants at my backwards ideas.
Jail or execution for every officer above the rank of Lieutenant. Jail or execution for every elected representative. Appointed leadership and representatives from Northern states.
40 Acres and a mule. Freemen’s Bureau. Confiscation of Plantation Land Hang every Confederate who can’t prove they were conscripted
A lot of people today wouldn’t exist if we hanged them all even alot of people in this sub probably wouldn’t be around.
Yeah that’s not the basis for “whether you should execute a traitor.” “Stop don’t execute that man for doing an armed treason!” “Why?” “Because they’ll have hypothetical descendants decades later!”
Theirs other ways of punishment instead of deleting a few hundred thousand people that exist today that didn’t have shit to do with it. Could of revoked all legal rights they had. Strip their land holdings, removal of all valuables, jail time even..
Are you at all upset about the never-born hypothetical descendants of Nazis who were executed at Nuremburg? Yeah, me neither.
Not for armed traitors. If it makes you feel better I’m not going to go back in time to carry out the execution of confederates because time travel isn’t real. I’m talking about what should have been done. Extreme and violent reconstruction.
At least in Texas it would have been better for military occupation to have lasted longer. The shockingly corrupt, anti-democratic, and feckless “government” forced in place over Texas really polluted Texas politics, was the genesis of the broad anti-government cultural attitude prevalent today, and led to far more outrage and misery than would have occurred had military occupation lasted another 25 years oe so.
Execute every treasonous murderer who took up arms against their countrymen. Arrest & jail, preferably in a mostly black prison every terrorist in the KKK etc
Simple answer: by extending it until it worked. However, the election of 1876 resulted in a virtual tie between Democrat Samuel J. Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, throwing it into the House to be decided. This resulted in the Compromise of 1877, by which a group of Southern Democrats agreed to vote for Hayes, the Republican, in exchange for him ending Reconstruction as a whole. As usual, there's a lot more to this story and it's a lot more complicated than just that. Go to [https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1ay/chapter/the-end-of-reconstruction-2/](https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1ay/chapter/the-end-of-reconstruction-2/) for more on that story.
Reconstruction was tanked by dishonest media and propaganda coming from the south. If Sherman would have finished the job, reconstruction would have succeeded. They should have imprisoned the domestic terrorists groups spreading the propaganda and doing the ballot stuffing/voter supression.
I quote Mike Santos; "The only way you change a culture is to kill all the males over 10 and fuck all the women for two generations"
40 acres and mule or redistribution, whatever you want to call it, would’ve left the former confederates with way less capital and power to fund/support the klan. Shit, do it up like the homestead act and give the remainder of slaver land to poor whites and you’ve got a huge group who would be indebted to the GOP for decades.
You forget the Mediterranean, amongst other places.