AHC reduce the black population of post civil war America without genocide.

At the start of the civil war there were 4.4m blacks in the U.S. Your challenge is to reduce this number to less than 1m by the year 1900 without mass genocide. And if the back population were reduced how would that effect the U.S.
 
Well, for starters (and ignoring all other implications) you'd have lost a minimum of 3.4 million people, so basically over a million and a half working adults, and of course all their descendants. That's not insignificant and they'd have to be replaced by somebody.
 
Well, for starters (and ignoring all other implications) you'd have lost a minimum of 3.4 million people, so basically over a million and a half working adults, and of course all their descendants. That's not insignificant and they'd have to be replaced by somebody.

Their numbers can be replaced, in otl about 25 million people moved to the U.S. From Europe np between 1850-1930, with a bit more relaxed immigration policy I can see that figure going up to 30-40 million easily.
 
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide
[...]
Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

You just need that 3.4 million people willingly decide to leave the fastest growing economy in the world by then. Only an economic mayhem would do it.
 
At the start of the civil war there were 4.4m blacks in the U.S. Your challenge is to reduce this number to less than 1m by the year 1900 without mass genocide. And if the back population were reduced how would that effect the U.S.

This is practically ASB. You could slightly reduce numbers with a combination of intermarriage with whites, and maybe adding categories like mulatto, octoroon and quadroon to the national census. Some would no doubt latch on to these categories more than being black and the black population would be smaller by that definition.

And yes, you would change A LOT of things.
 
Building the Panama Canal starts earlier (before 1870) newly free slaves are offered land and money to move there to Panama to build it.
 

Vahktang

Donor
Independant Homeland or Trail of Tears 2.
The blacks are moved to the Oklahoma territories, armed with outmoded guns and army surplus equipment, most of it taken from Confederate armories to disarm the former confederate states. They are used as a shield against the plains indians.
They never endeavor nor are ever invited to join the U.S. They build up their own industry and economy. Blacks from the U.S. move there, seeing more opportunity and less oppression.
By 1900, the area has several sizeable black cities, etc, with a population of 1/25 the surrounding U.S.'s, with unique and similiar culture and economic ties to the U.S.
The black population remaining in the U.S. could easily be less than a million.
Or
Joseph Smith sees an opportunity and opens up Mormanism to Blacks. After the war, they move to Utah and settle. Bouyed by the huge influx of a faithful population they go for the independant Deserat thing again, and this time succeed.
 

Remark

Banned
This isn't ASB. This is the back to Africa movement.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-to-Africa_movement


If we want to get this done before 1900, we need to avoid both reconstruction and Jim Crow. Have Lincoln survive and (by embracing his innate racism) attempt to reconcile with the South. An easy way to do that would be to ship out freed former slaves.

Innate racism?

“Let us discard all this quibbling about [this] race and that race and the other race being inferior… Let us discard all these things and unite as one people throughout this land until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”
-Lincoln in the Douglass Debates

Just because he used political expediency to achieve Emancipation doesn't mean he's gonna stab the freedmen in the back. By the 1860 election he had come to believe that real equality between the races was possible.
 
Lincoln was a bit conservatively racist, but he also truly believed in racial equality, he was one of the guys who liked segregation for the "separate but equal" part and not the taking advantage part.

Not much in our day, but wildly progressive in his day.
 
The blacks are moved to the Oklahoma territories,.

Forced migration IS genocide.

This isn't ASB. This is the back to Africa movement.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-to-Africa_movement


If we want to get this done before 1900, we need to avoid both reconstruction and Jim Crow. Have Lincoln survive and (by embracing his innate racism) attempt to reconcile with the South. An easy way to do that would be to ship out freed former slaves.

Building the Panama Canal starts earlier (before 1870) newly free slaves are offered land and money to move there to Panama to build it.

I don't think that you people are aware of the magnitude of the numbers: 3.4 million people is about 80% of 2015 population of Panama or Liberia.
 
At the start of the civil war there were 4.4m blacks in the U.S. Your challenge is to reduce this number to less than 1m by the year 1900 without mass genocide. And if the back population were reduced how would that effect the U.S.

Have the CSA win. Then the the vast majority of the blacks end up in the CSA.

Challenge met.
 
Have Southern state governments get behind sending blacks to Haiti, other parts of the Caribbean, and Africa (Liberia, of course, but possibly other parts of Africa). Have the US government in general emphasise this and maybe even give incentives for this migration. The South can replace the lost labour with European immigrants, and possibly Chinese immigrants as well.
 

oberdada

Gone Fishin'
The only thing I can think of is a massive Plague, that would, of course hit the entire population, and is, if not man-made, no genocide...
 

RousseauX

Donor
Have Southern state governments get behind sending blacks to Haiti, other parts of the Caribbean, and Africa (Liberia, of course, but possibly other parts of Africa). Have the US government in general emphasise this and maybe even give incentives for this migration. The South can replace the lost labour with European immigrants, and possibly Chinese immigrants as well.

The problem is that the southern governments didn't particularly want this, they had a nice arrangement where blacks were serfs and can be easily kept under control with passbooks and jim crow laws. They basically fought a series of race wars against freed African slaves during the reconstruction and won. In this sense, having blacks was actually a necessity to preserving something like the antebellum south in the late 19th-early 20th century.

Importing white European labor or even Chinese immigrants to replace them means you've effectively overturned the entire southern social order: which is the very thing the southern elite wanted to avoid the most.
 
Get them to be wealthier or failing that legalize abortion earlier. Don't think it Would be possible for the black population to go down, but as a percentage it's possible.
 
The problem is that the southern governments didn't particularly want this, they had a nice arrangement where blacks were serfs and can be easily kept under control with passbooks and jim crow laws. They basically fought a series of race wars against freed African slaves during the reconstruction and won. In this sense, having blacks was actually a necessity to preserving something like the antebellum south in the late 19th-early 20th century.

Importing white European labor or even Chinese immigrants to replace them means you've effectively overturned the entire southern social order: which is the very thing the southern elite wanted to avoid the most.

Yeah, that's why this whole thing is really difficult to do. I guess you could make a "new order" where Catholics and Chinese are your new underclass, but they had such a great thing going, why waste time transitioning?
 
Forced migration IS genocide.





I don't think that you people are aware of the magnitude of the numbers: 3.4 million people is about 80% of 2015 population of Panama or Liberia.

Far , far fewer than the net European migrantion to the USA 1860 -1914.
 
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