AHC: Create the most effective Radical Reconstruction

What exactly is the point of getting rid of the planters? They lost power anyway within a generation or so - and the governments which replaced them, dominated by poorer whites, were more racist than their predecessors, not less. From a black pov, it was a change for the worse.

In any case, though, the whole thing is academic, as the votes in Congress for such measures simply never existed. Even the House version of the 14th Amendment, which would have disfranchised leading Rebs until 1870, proved too much for the Senate and had to be watered down. And even the weakened measure, in its turn, lasted only till 1872, when a Congress still heavily Republican produced two-thirds votes in both houses to lift virtually all the disabilities imposed by the 14A.

Practically everyone was eager for reconciliation. Some Republicans would have preferred it not to be at the expense of the Negro, but over time even that reservation faded. The poltical will for the sort of extreme measures being suggested here did not exist and couldn't be made to exist.
 
Practically everyone was eager for reconciliation. Some Republicans would have preferred it not to be at the expense of the Negro, but over time even that reservation faded. The poltical will for the sort of extreme measures being suggested here did not exist and couldn't be made to exist.

This. Unless you somehow find a way that the "couldn't be made to exist" is fixed, it doesn't matter what measures you propose - no one is going to be willing to implement them.

I think if there's a president other than Johnson you might get some more support for specific measures, but at most that ultimately becomes just more to back up the (OTL timing) 1950s and 1960s stuff - it doesn't make the immediate lot better.
 
This. Unless you somehow find a way that the "couldn't be made to exist" is fixed, it doesn't matter what measures you propose - no one is going to be willing to implement them.

I think if there's a president other than Johnson you might get some more support for specific measures, but at most that ultimately becomes just more to back up the (OTL timing) 1950s and 1960s stuff - it doesn't make the immediate lot better.


Quite. My own feeling - which made me rather unpopular in my early days on shwi - is that OTL's Reconstruction achieved about as much as could have been achieved, given the attitudes of the day. It wrote civil rights, including specifically the right to vote, into the Constitution, so that they were there, on the books, against the day when public opinion caught up with them.

OTOH, as long as that opinion isn't with you, you can put what you like into the Constitution without it making a hap'orth of difference. This was a lesson which the authors of Prohibition had to learn all over again fifty years on.
 
Quite. My own feeling - which made me rather unpopular in my early days on shwi - is that OTL's Reconstruction achieved about as much as could have been achieved, given the attitudes of the day. It wrote civil rights, including specifically the right to vote, into the Constitution, so that they were there, on the books, against the day when public opinion caught up with them.

OTOH, as long as that opinion isn't with you, you can put what you like into the Constitution without it making a hap'orth of difference. This was a lesson which the authors of Prohibition had to learn all over again fifty years on.

Yeah. I'm not 100% sure you couldn't go further if there was will by the Unionists (I'm not going to say "the North"), but at most it would be limiting things like the KKK a bit more - extralegal methods of defeating it as opposed to technically legal ones.

And really, that's not as big an improvement as it sounds like.

Prohibition seems to be a case of something where there might have been some support for some level, but . . . for purposes of discussion, as you said.

Plain and simple, unpopular laws are going to be unenforcable at a reasonable cost to a democracy, by definition. No way around it. :mad:
 
In the Spring and early summer of 1865 it was clear that the Southern way of life was defeated.

In otl the former owners of people remained owners of land and thereofore the only available employers. They were the traditional ruling class.

Remove that class (It would have been legal though cruel and likely have caused a bad reaction to have hanged them)

Offering pardons to former rebels and just requiring loss of property for some could have been sold as rather generous.
 
In the Spring and early summer of 1865 it was clear that the Southern way of life was defeated.

In otl the former owners of people remained owners of land and thereofore the only available employers. They were the traditional ruling class.

Remove that class (It would have been legal though cruel and likely have caused a bad reaction to have hanged them)

Offering pardons to former rebels and just requiring loss of property for some could have been sold as rather generous.

But who would buy it?
 
But who would buy it?


Even OTL, incidentally, quite a lot of land was forfeited - for non-payment of taxes. An awful lot of landowners were left broke by the war, and couldn't pay.

Needless to say, there was never any question of it being given to the freedmen. The States needed the revenue, and could get that only by selling the land. Since few freedmen had any money to speak of, they weren't in the running.
 
Even OTL, incidentally, quite a lot of land was forfeited - for non-payment of taxes. An awful lot of landowners were left broke by the war, and couldn't pay.

Needless to say, there was never any question of it being given to the freedmen. The States needed the revenue, and could get that only by selling the land. Since few freedmen had any money to speak of, they weren't in the running.

This might be solvable if one tried to find a solution, but I'm at a loss for what solutions that can be contemplated quite easily in the abstract would actually be accepted by people of the time.
 
By sold I meant sold in propaganda and political terms.

Redistribution to the freed slaves would have been hard but not impossible politically

(it would afterall be the rather common practice of using public assets to help supporters of a governing party - Republicans as former slaves would surely be)
 
Exactly. Who's buying it?

And as Mike said, who would even be trying to sell it?

Radical Republicanism represents a minority, and vengeful Radicalism - which this would be - even more so.


Keep in mind that a big slice of the postwar Republican leadership would have recently been senior oficers in the Union Army - in many cases former colleagues or even old West Point classmates of their Confederate opposite numbers. By and large, dog did not eat dog.
 
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Keep in mind that a big slice of the postwar Republican leadership would have recentlly been senior oficers in the Union Army - in many cases former colleagues or even old West Point classmates of their Confederate opposite numbers. By and large, dog did not eat dog.

And quite a few Democrats, while we're listing.
 
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