Why bother with confiscation?
After 1867, Southerners had an equal right to take advantage of the Homestead Act. Their big handicap was lack of money for draft animals and equipment - and that problem would apply at least equally to the Freedmen.
Aiming for a truly Radical Reconstruction: would this work?
- Thread starter sciscisciortino
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Why bother with confiscation?
After 1867, Southerners had an equal right to take advantage of the Homestead Act. Their big handicap was lack of money for draft animals and equipment - and that problem would apply at least equally to the Freedmen.
I believe it was something that emancipated slaves were led to believe during the Civil War. The Radical Republicans certainly talked about seizing the land of the treasonous Southerners, and the Emancipation Proclamation certainly fanned the fire - after all, if the Federal Government was going to seize the human property of these slavers and not return them, then why should they hold hopes of keeping their land?
What they believed and what they were promised were two different things.
And the Emancipation Proclamation explicitly admonished "the people so declared to be free" that "when allowed [they should] labour faithfully for reasonable wages". IOW it clearly assumed that they would still be labourers, not landowners