A Successful Reconstruction Post-ACW

Ooh, this topic is one I have a lot of feelings about.

I think there are a few smaller things you could do:
a) Three confederate soldiers eventually served on the Supreme Court so enact a law preventing anyone who fought against the Union from holding office;

The 14th Amendment (Sec 3) did this OTL for anyone who had previously sworn to uphold the Constitution. But the Congress lifted this restriction in 1872, ie while still heavily Republican and before the economy went pearshape. The political will for anything like that just didn't last.


b) Strike down the restrictive "black codes" passed by the South in the Supreme Court basically as soon as they're passed;

On what grounds? The 14th Amendment was still in the future, and in 1865 Congress had yet to pass any laws to enforce the 13th. In any case the Codes were all done away with under Radical Reconstruction even OTL. Why would doing so a year or two earlier make any difference?


c) Designate the Confederate flag as a symbol of an enemy nation;

Which makes a difference how? Did the KKK and related organisations normally fly a flag when they went out about their business?


d) Instead of paying slave-owners for their loss of profit, provide stipends to slaves as reparations for their years in servitude

Slave owners were never paid for loss of profit. The 14th Amendment (Sec 4) expressly forbade that. And giving money to Freedmen would have involved raising taxes, which would be high enough anyway to pay for the war - quite ASB.


And then the bigger one, ensure Samuel J. Tilden wins over Rutherford B. Hayes
.

Huh! Tilden was a Democrat and would have pulled the troops from the South just as quick as OTL.


My professor mentioned that there was a plan to take land away from former plantation/slave-owners and give it to the newly freed in the form of "forty acres and a mule" and then open up the rest to be purchased by anyone. OTL that did not happen, of course. It'll probably be hard to pass.

There was no "plan". During the war, the Union Army found itself coping with huge numbers of slaves who had escaped during the turmoil of war or whose masters had fled, and as an emergency measure some of these had been settled on abandoned plantations. Iirc, Congress later passed a law allowing Freedmen to be granted land with "such title as the United States can convey", a form of words reflecting their knowledge that permanent confiscations were almost certainly unconstitutional. Thaddeus Stevens and a handful of others played with the idea, but it was never government policy under any Administration, nor even remotely likely to be.
 
My professor mentioned that there was a plan to take land away from former plantation/slave-owners and give it to the newly freed in the form of "forty acres and a mule" and then open up the rest to be purchased by anyone. OTL that did not happen, of course. It'll probably be hard to pass.

I read the way this is phrased and I can't help but suggest that you look into it a bit more. If your main experience with the notion of forty acres and a mule comes from a professor mentioning it once, then I'd say that professor was not focused on the details of the issue.
 
Hello Everyone

Long time Ah.com member but this will be my first thread. I want to get some thoughts on how to ensure that Reconstruction in the South is successful.

No offence meant, but have you used the search function to look up previous threads on this topic?

Reconstruction is one of the forum's "hardy perennials", and most of what has been said here has been covered many times before. There's been a huge amount of interesting stuff that is well worth a read.
 
Perhaps a more organized and stronger s
No offence meant, but have you used the search function to look up previous threads on this topic?

Reconstruction is one of the forum's "hardy perennials", and most of what has been said here has been covered many times before. There's been a huge amount of interesting stuff that is well worth a read.

No Offense taken, i actually haven't but I will now. Thanks for the suggestion.
 
Huh! Tilden was a Democrat and would have pulled the troops from the South just as quick as OTL.

Whoops, you're right. I should have said: have James Blaine win the Republican nomination instead of Hayes, either by postponing the Mulligan letters scandal until after the election or not having it happen at all.

I read the way this is phrased and I can't help but suggest that you look into it a bit more. If your main experience with the notion of forty acres and a mule comes from a professor mentioning it once, then I'd say that professor was not focused on the details of the issue.

It's been awhile since I've done American history; this came up recently in an anthropology class. Probably could have worded that more clearly.
 
Even the 13th Amendment explicitly allows involuntary servitude
Would it be possible to not have that part? The writers of the amendment realize how easily it could be used as a slavery loophole and don't include it.
Or was it intended as a slavery loophole in the first place?

I'd agree it should count as slavery, especially when the flimsiest of charges could be used.
 
You know, Cruikshank was a 5-4 decision. A slight shift in the court, from either a different composition or one justice ruling differently, and you have a radically different result in the south. Even if they could establish various Jim Crow laws, they would have a harder time enforcing them.
 
Would it be possible to not have that part? The writers of the amendment realize how easily it could be used as a slavery loophole and don't include it.
Or was it intended as a slavery loophole in the first place?

I'd agree it should count as slavery, especially when the flimsiest of charges could be used.

The inclusion isn't racially charged, but the practice is. In theory it applies equally to all races, and in practice all races have been subject to it, though clearly there is the overwhelming bias towards blacks. That however stems from the mass incarceration of blacks, though I wouldn't say that one leads to the other.
 
Whoops, you're right. I should have said: have James Blaine win the Republican nomination instead of Hayes, either by postponing the Mulligan letters scandal until after the election or not having it happen at all.

That might well just produce a Tilden Presidency another way.

Hayes was a popular Governor of Ohio, but took that State by only a single percentage point. Nominate someone else, and the State probably goes Democratic, giving Tilden another 22 Electoral votes - three more than the combined vote of those disputed Southern States. So he has an easy win.

Incidentally, Istr from an earlier thread that the decision to withdraw troops from the South was actually made by Grant, though not carried out until after Hayes' inauguration.
 
It was successful.

The vast majority of ex-Rebs accepted the outcome of the war as settling forever all question of secession, rather than fighting on in the back streets ad aeturnam, like the Irish. Only a generation after Appomattox, Southern boys were queuing up to enlist for the war with Spain, and the next generation would serve willingly in WW1. They were fellow-countrymen again, as Lincoln and Grant had hoped.

Blacks went from being chattels to at least nominal citizens, even if for some time distinctly second-class ones, and constitutional amendments were passed which would enable the north to enforce full citizenship for them, should it ever be willing to make the effort. None of this was even remotely likely in 1860.

This exactly. Reconstruction, from a political standpoint was successful. From a moral or ethical standpoint? Not so much.
 

A Successfull Freedman Bank

Another idea that I haven’t seen explored too often is a surviving freedman bank.

“The Freedman's Saving and Trust Company, popularly known as the Freedman's Savings Bank, was a private corporation chartered by the U.S. government to encourage and guide the economic development of the newly emancipated African-American communities in the post-Civil War period. Although functioning only between 1865 and 1874, the company achieved notable successes as a leading financial institution of African-Americans. Its failure was devastating to the newly emancipated black community. Its archives are valued as an exhaustive collection of information regarding the African American community and its socio-economic life in the immediate aftermath of emancipation.”

The only timeline I know about the subject is Kooluk Swordsman’s “Children Of Fire: An African-American TL

Edward Alexander Bouchet - The Black Bell/Edison ?

For some time I toyed with the idea adding another element to the timeline, Edward Bouchet inventing something valuable and getting financed by the surviving Freedman Bank.

Edward Alexander Bouchet (September 15, 1852 – October 28, 1918) was an American physicist and educator and was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from any American university, completing his dissertation in physics at Yale in 1876. On the basis of his academic record he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In 1874, he had become one of the first African Americans to graduate from Yale College.

My idea was that he stumbles upon Karl Ferdinand Braun’s work on semiconducter and chose them for his PhD topic. Now coincidentally Yale is geographically pretty close to the Sterling Hill mine. It is one of the few places were zincite can be found in nature. Even better, one of the earliest mineralogical papers in U.S. scientific literature (1810) was devoted to zincite, one of the local ore minerals. Thus it wouldn’t be surprising if Bouchet chose zincite as one potential semiconductor. Unlike other semiconductor it also can work as a negative resistance diode, which means it can be used to amplify signals as well as function NOT- logic gate. With a bit of money an ingenuity we may see our very own black version of the Bell or Edison Laboratory etc. More conventionally he could have discovered radio, earlier and developed that. The most important part would be that it is undeniably groundbreaking and commercializeable.
 
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