Could the rise of Jim Crow have been prevented?

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But if the United States does what it just -- exiling or executing every last Confederate officer or major official, and all the major planter sonsofbitches -- then suddenly the South is without an elite. Sure, the place would be dominated by Yankee capital, but a new political class would have to be created, and I doubt that, in the absence of the planters, this new class would resort to such extremes in preserving their own control over the South.


Why not? The planter class did lose power in the South toward the end of the century, but the new governments, elected by poorer whites, were if anything more racist than the planter ones.

Anyway you haven't explained why anyone needs to bother. With the war won, the job in hand was to reconcile the defeated South to the restored Union, which might otherwise be saddled with a gigantic "Irish problem". Pushing harder for Black rights would obstruct that process, not assist it. So the sensible thing was to let it drop and leave it to a later generation to worry about - which was exactly what happened.
 

scholar

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Why not? The planter class did lose power in the South toward the end of the century, but the new governments, elected by poorer whites, were if anything more racist than the planter ones.
Agreed. The "gentlemen" planters considered themselves benevolent leaders who held themselves aloof for the benefit of all. They genuinely believed Africans required a carefully measured hand that allowed them to prosper if properly handled and kept in their place. This is why they were initially receptive to men like Booker T Washington. The new leaders wanted to humiliate them, as they felt humiliated, and force them in their place. Both condemnable backwards racism, but one was clearly worse than the other.
 
Maybe if there was a real guerrilla war through 1865 and 66, and the U.S. had to bring fire and sword to the whole south (I think something like 6/7 slaves were still slaves at the end of the conflict), and USCT expanded to the point that you could make a black middle class based on widespread military service, white supremacy would no longer be tenable in the south, but OTL, there were only two boxes the U.S. felt the need to check off, restoring the Union and ending slavery, and both of them were well and checked off in 1865.
 

CalBear

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Is there any way that the rise of Jim Crow could have been prevented? If so, how?
Unlikely. The only way it works is if the Federal government keeps serious firepower in the South, long past the end of overt policing by troops IOTL.

There was no real mechanism at the time for the Feds to do something like this. If Congress had wanted to spend the funds it could have massively upped the size of the U.S. Marshal's Service, but that isn't really the Marshal's charter and plenty of folks in the North would have objected to the costs.

Most critically, you have to get the average white American to care. Whites made up 90% of the population, they don't care, nothing happens. Bigotry was rampant in the post war era, not just toward Blacks, but towards Italians, Irish, Catholics, you name it. Hard to see how people care about what is happening in Mississippi when they manage to hate other whites in their local community.
 

RousseauX

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Perhaps gradual abolishing of slavery.

Or then let Abraham Lincoln serve full two terms or then he keeps Hamlin as VP and him becomes president after the assassination. But probably even then we see Jim Crow altough perhaps not so harsh as OTL.
Gradual abolishment of slavery will almost certainly lead to the installment of some kind of Jim Crow because even if the south does away with slavery it still wants to keep blacks on the bottom tier of the social ladder, this is what happened OTL and gradual abolishment doesn't change that
 

RousseauX

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Southern slaveholders don't want to fight that, and choose gradual emancipation with compensation.

Slavery dies a natural death.
Yes: and Jim Crow in one form or another will rise up after slavery because the south will not accept the legitimacy of even nominal racial equality in a society where 33-55% (depending on state) of the population was black
 

CalBear

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Here's a idea: Civil War doesn't happen, tensions keep but slavery stands.

Meanwhile, things come to a head in Brazil and Brazil has its own civil war, say, in the late 1860 or early 1870. Dom Pedro II has surviving male progeny, so he believes the empire can outlive him, and thus fights back against the slaveholders who want to depose him and his family. Possibly includes paraguayans or argentineans feeding the slavers with guns and ammo, or maybe even doing a direct intervention.

The ensuing war ends up being the brazilian equivalent of the OTL Civil War. Maybe it spirals into a general South American war. Slavery is banned when the Empíre finishes stomping revolting slave holders. Thousands hundreds or maybe even millions die.

Southern slaveholders don't want to fight that, and choose gradual emancipation with compensation.

Slavery dies a natural death.
The biggest roadblock to this (entirely sensible) gradual end, even with compensation, is that it was impossible to buy all the slaves in the South. The value of Slaves held in the South at the start of the Civil War was ~$3.2B (@ $800 per individual). The entire U.S. government Budget in 1860 was $63M. If the Government put 100% of the Budget to buying the slaves to emancipate them it would have take decades (50 years if the budget remained static, which it wouldn't as new revenues came along, but the point remain valid). Post war it took 45 years to pay down the Civil War Bonds that are close to the value of the slaves held at the start of the war. The only way the U.S. managed to even get the money to fight the war was by selling bonds (5% of the entire population held civil war bonds, only about 1% had a bank account), no way that sort of investment is made in "emancipation bonds".
 

scholar

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The biggest roadblock to this (entirely sensible) gradual end, even with compensation, is that it was impossible to buy all the slaves in the South. The value of Slaves held in the South at the start of the Civil War was ~$3.2B (@ $800 per individual). The entire U.S. government Budget in 1860 was $63M. If the Government put 100% of the Budget to buying the slaves to emancipate them it would have take decades (50 years if the budget remained static, which it wouldn't as new revenues came along, but the point remain valid). Post war it took 45 years to pay down the Civil War Bonds that are close to the value of the slaves held at the start of the war. The only way the U.S. managed to even get the money to fight the war was by selling bonds (5% of the entire population held civil war bonds, only about 1% had a bank account), no way that sort of investment is made in "emancipation bonds".
Really? I listened to something by Allen Guelzo that more or less stated the opposite. That the total cost of the war, plus losses in infrastructure and manpower, vastly outmatched the cost of gradual emancipation.
 
Lincoln's survival could have prevented it. I honestly believe that. Lincoln was conciliatory towards the South, unlike the Radical Republicans. However, it was for the purposes of fairness all around, and moving forward on everyone's part. What is misunderstood is that he did not intend to roll over for the South. If they violated the rights and liberties of freedmen, indeed, if they expressed "malice", he intended to take action against it. His belief was that it should be everyone treating each other with charity, and that there were legal ramifications for not doing so. Jim Crow was the type of antebellum ignorance and barbarism that should have been and could have been headed off, with the Civil War as the death nail to it, and the post-war as the development towards equality before the law. Instead, there was a brief period of hope and progress and equality before the law that was crushed by Southern violence and suppression and growing Northern apathy, and finally overwhelmed by a return to an unfortunate normalcy. It's as if the Civil Rights movement of the 20th century progressed for a few years, and made real progress, but was ignored by those in power that could do enough to protect it and foster it, and subsumed by Southern White violence until it disappeared. There are moments in time that are a spark and a flame that need to be taken advantage of or they will flicker out.

EDIT:
It does matter who is president. Instead of Lincoln, there was the bigoted Andrew Johnson. And in those pivotal early moments, he failed miserably, and allowed Southern bigotry to flourish and become law, with the Southerners given the sense that they could do all of that. To quote Carl Schurz:

It was pretended at the time and it has since been asserted by historians and publicists that Mr. Johnson's Reconstruction policy was only a continuation of that of Mr. Lincoln. This is true only in a superficial sense, but not in reality. Mr. Lincoln had indeed put forth reconstruction plans which contemplated an early restoration of some of the rebel states. But he had done this while the Civil War was still going on, and for the evident purpose of encouraging loyal movements in those States and of weakening the Confederate State government there. Had he lived, he would have as ardently wished to stop bloodshed and to reunite as he ever did. But is it to be supposed for a moment that, seeing the late master class in the South intent upon subjecting the freedmen again to a system very much akin to slavery, Lincoln would have consented to abandon those freemen to the mercies of that master class?
 
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CalBear

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Really? I listened to something by Allen Guelzo that more or less stated the opposite. That the total cost of the war, plus losses in infrastructure and manpower, vastly outmatched the cost of gradual emancipation.
The total cost was greater. $5.2B to $3.2B. Only $3.4B was paid off before the bills for the Spanish American War started to come into the mix. It can be argued, with some success that the U.S. is STILL paying for the Civil War since there are two women still receiving ACW pensions that were given to their fathers (and yes, both of their Dad's took care of that business well into their 70-80s, Go Team! :p).

The point, however, remains valid. There is no way the U.S. government manages to generate the funds to pay for a gradual emancipation. Especially since: 1. children would be born who the slave owners would expect to be compensated for & 2. farmers, workmen and small merchants are not going to put up their hard earned money to buy Bonds to pay some rich guy to let a slave go, and then have that slave looking for their job. 5% of the entire population isn't going to buy the Bonds and the middle and upper classes are not going to sit still for the additional taxes (including the first income tax in U.S. history) to make payments to rich planters. Human nature doesn't work that way. "Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute" and all that.
 

RousseauX

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Lincoln's survival could have prevented it. I honestly believe that. Lincoln was conciliatory towards the South, unlike the Radical Republicans. However, it was for the purposes of fairness all around, and moving forward on everyone's part. What is misunderstood is that he did not intend to roll over for the South. If they violated the rights and liberties of freedmen, indeed, if they expressed "malice", he intended to take action against it. His belief was that it should be everyone treating each other with charity, and that there were legal ramifications for not doing so. Jim Crow was the type of antebellum ignorance and barbarism that should have been and could have been headed off, with the Civil War as the death nail to it, and the post-war as the development towards equality before the law. Instead, there was a brief period of hope and progress and equality before the law that was crushed by Southern violence and suppression and growing Northern apathy, and finally overwhelmed by a return to an unfortunate normalcy. It's as if the Civil Rights movement of the 20th century progressed for a few years, and made real progress, but was ignored by those in power that could do enough to protect it and foster it, and subsumed by Southern White violence until it disappeared. There are moments in time that are a spark and a flame that need to be taken advantage of or they will flicker out.

EDIT:
It does matter who is president. Instead of Lincoln, there was the bigoted Andrew Johnson. And in those pivotal early moments, he failed miserably, and allowed Southern bigotry to flourish and become law, with the Southerners given the sense that they could do all of that. To quote Carl Schurz:
The problem is that reconciliation with the south is incompatible with a southern society where a black person has equal rights as a white person. The pre-war southern elite as well as most of poor southern whites believed in a hierarchical racial societies in which blacks were at the very bottom and it's not like 1865 changed that in any way. It's not like the average southern white believed that a blacks were racially equal to whites because of Appomattox. But yeah if Lincoln lived all that really would have changed is that blacks would have being thrown under the bus sooner under the banner of reconciliation.

The only way to have headed off Jim Crow was for reconstruction to be more disruptive and more willing to use force to guarantee rights for freedman than the federal government was OTL. So you have to assume that Lincoln is willing to be harder on the south than OTL radical Republicans and I don't really see it.
 
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The problem is that reconciliation with the south is incompatible with a southern society where a black person has equal rights as a white person. The pre-war southern elite as well as most of poor southern whites believed in a hierarchical racial societies in which blacks were at the very bottom and it's not like 1865 changed that in any way. It's not like the average southern white believed that a blacks were racially equal to whites because of Appomattox. But yeah if Lincoln lived all that really would have changed is that blacks would have being thrown under the bus sooner under the banner of reconciliation.

Lincoln was not Johnson, who ignored and permitted Southern "Black Codes" and other racism, and who undermined those sparks of equality and improvement because of convenience and because he himself was a racist. Lincoln believed in reconciliation, but not that the South had the right to impose inequality before the law on freed Black Americans, nor illegal violence and intimidation. Lincoln's call for bringing the nation together was not a call for weakness and holding one's tongue while the South reimposed an antebellum order.
 

RousseauX

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Lincoln was not Johnson, who ignored and permitted Southern "Black Codes" and other racism, and who undermined those sparks of equality and improvement because of convenience and because he himself was a racist. Lincoln believed in reconciliation, but not that the South had the right to impose inequality before the law on freed Black Americans, nor illegal violence and intimidation. Lincoln's call for bringing the nation together was not a call for weakness and holding one's tongue while the South reimposed an antebellum order.
So do you expect Lincoln or his successor to keep federal troops past 1876

What -was- Lincoln's vision for post-bellum south anyway outside of "reconciliation"? Did he actually want racial equality between blacks and whites in Mississippi?
 

Yun-shuno

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Yes, southern racists played pretty skillful poker.

Of course, the north let them.
There was federal overreach and military excess however unpopular it is to admit. You had Yankee soldiers disenfranchising southern whites at gunpoint. Oh and getting drunk and stealing bread from little children.

Honestly how many of you have ever been to the south?

The Dunning School of the reconstruction is more accurate than modern historians with their left-liberal and anti-southern prejudices are willing to admit.
 
Yes: and Jim Crow in one form or another will rise up after slavery because the south will not accept the legitimacy of even nominal racial equality in a society where 33-55% (depending on state) of the population was black

Yeah, the population numbers make it tough for Jim Crow to not emerge. The prospect of ex-slaves suddenly forming a powerful voting bloc made a lot of whites uneasy, even if they hadn't particularly believed in slavery.

If the black population of the South is a lot smaller, perhaps it's possible.
 

RousseauX

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There was federal overreach and military excess however unpopular it is to admit. You had Yankee soldiers disenfranchising southern whites at gunpoint. Oh and getting drunk and stealing bread from little children.

Honestly how many of you have ever been to the south?

The Dunning School of the reconstruction is more accurate than modern historians with their left-liberal and anti-southern prejudices are willing to admit.
The KKK were literally burning down schools for black children but obvsly the federal government was overreaching in trying to stop that
 

Yun-shuno

Banned
The KKK were literally burning down schools for black children but obvsly the federal government was overreaching in trying to stop that
So? It was a violent time and unfortunately the KKK had support mostly because of carpetbaggers and the Feds.

I guess you've never lived under military occupation.
 

RousseauX

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So? It was a violent time and unfortunately the KKK had support mostly because of carpetbaggers and the Feds.

I guess you've never lived under military occupation.
lol that's such a lie

how many federal soldiers from the army did the KKK attack/kill

how many black schools or black churches did they burn

the KKK existed because the south wanted a racial hierarchy where blacks are at the bottom, the feds were gonna leave eventually: blacks weren't
 
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