Could the rise of Jim Crow have been prevented?

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Really? Apologizing for the KKK because it was a violent time?

To be fair, he's not entirely wrong.

It's instructive to watch a couple of movies The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Gangs of New York. Yes, of course they are fiction but they are pretty realistic in bringing out just how much violence was accepted as normal in the mid-19C - levels of it that would be hard to imagine today. I came away from TAoHF wondering if the post-ACW South was all that much more violent than the ante-bellum one. It may have been, somewhat, but not as much as all that.
 
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.


That suggests that secession was even more idiotic than commonly supposed. Once the Territorial issue was out of the way, and farmers going west no longer had to face the prospect of competing with slave labour, most northerners would have a vested interest in allowing the South to keep slavery - so as not to have several million free (but penniless) negroes looking for jobs.
 
I doubt that there's any realistic way to avert Jim Crow, unfortunate as that is. As has been said by others in this thread, the political situation was simply too far gone by the time an actual competent Reconstruction government (that of Ulysses Grant) was elected.

Now, had Lincoln selected somebody different as his running mate in 1864 (like Benjamin Butler for instance) then we'd be cooking with gas.

Probably not enough to properly fry the KKK and their evil cohorts, but the situation might be somewhat improved. Maybe.
 

SRBO

Banned
The entire race relations in the US seems to be "hurr i don't like blacks because they're dumm genetically but actually they vote for people i don't liek reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" and the other guy is "waaaah waaah i hate myself for what my great-great-great-grandfather's uncle's friend's boss was doing let's encourage demographic suicide instead" and there is a third dude who is a real human bean and a real hero and knows both are wrong but gets shat on by both's private media armies for being against the narrative.

Short version: no it wasn't avoidable. Even if they held to the principle of separate but equal and give equal services to blacks, they would be better off (but that wasn't intended to happen, as it would lead to normal demographic relations and not current year's ultrabinary autism)
 
I doubt that there's any realistic way to avert Jim Crow, unfortunate as that is. As has been said by others in this thread, the political situation was simply too far gone by the time an actual competent Reconstruction government (that of Ulysses Grant) was elected.

Now, had Lincoln selected somebody different as his running mate in 1864 (like Benjamin Butler for instance) then we'd be cooking with gas.

Probably not enough to properly fry the KKK and their evil cohorts, but the situation might be somewhat improved. Maybe.


Trouble is, if Butler gets tough all that does is arouse Northern sympathy for the fallen foe - especially as a lot of things like the Black Codes probably won't have a chance to happen, so there will seem less justification for such a policy. Stuff like "The Prostrate State" will be appearing even earlier.

Ten to one Butler loses out to Grant for the 1868 nomination, and after that things go much as OTL.
 
Trouble is, if Butler gets tough all that does is arouse Northern sympathy for the fallen foe - especially as a lot of things like the Black Codes probably won't have a chance to happen, so there will seem less justification for such a policy. Stuff like "The Prostrate State" will be appearing even earlier.

Ten to one Butler loses out to Grant for the 1868 nomination, and after that things go much as OTL.

This is true. Butler was not a popular man in the south (there was a booming trade in chamber-pots with Butler's likeness painted at the bottom) and that hatred would only intensify if he were elected. I suggested him mostly because he's really the only realistic choice towards having a Radical in the White House before 1869, unless you successfully impeach Johnson...which wouldn't do much.

My hope would be that a President Butler would do enough legally that Jim Crow could be ripped away from the south earlier than IOTL due to there being a stronger legal base saying that treating people like crap based upon the color of their skin is both unethical and unconstitutional.
 

missouribob

Banned
Let's see:
- Confederates win, slavery continues, Jim Crow never needs to be invented. (Unlikely)
- Confederates never split in the first place, slavery dies slowly, the Black Codes are enacted instead. Without the Constitutional amendments from post civil war blacks are kept in quasi-slavery in the south. (Unlikely)
-War drags due to foreign interference from Britain but the North still wins, albeit a few years later. Due to the continued fighting and the Confederates receiving foreign help the North grows more radical. The Elites of the South are hung/exiled, the land is redistributed to poor black and white and at least one or two states (Max) are black majority and retain control. The United States has 4 Black Senators + Congress persons constantly pushing for integration/equality. In at least two states Jim Crow is never formed, although you can expect a hell of a backlash in the south. (Unlikely)
-State suicide theory is accepted in Washington. New states are created two of which are black and the rest to keep the Democrats out of power as much as possible. See the same comments above about havens from racism for blacks. I guess you can get to this by the confederates using terrorism or something against the north. From what I can tell the Confederates didn't really think like that. (Unlikely)
-Instead of creating a majority black state out of existing states a plan is implemented to create Oklahoma as a black homeland. See previous comment about an oasis for blacks in a sea of Jim Crow. (Unlikely)

So all the possibilities I can think of are unlikely and on top of that at least the first two are WAY worse than Jim Crow in every way.
 
https://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/122/carr/seaoutline.htm

" . . . Sherman meet with Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War, and a delegation of twenty black leaders on January 12, 1865 to address the problems of the Freedmen. After hearing that what the Freedmen desired most was their own land, he issued Special Field Order #15. This order declared that the Sea Islands on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia would be reserved for Freedman. Under this order each family would be eligible for 40 acres of land for their own cultivation. . . Sherman would go on to allow Freedmen use of army mules that were were no longer fit for army service. . . . As Sherman's army marched by, freedman had abandoned the plantations and begun to follow the army. Feeding and clothing thousands of people became a strain. Sherman would later claim that his order was a temporary measure and was not meant to give the Freedmen permanent possession of the land. . . "

" . . . In addition, the man in charge of the Sea Islands as inspector of Settlements and Plantations, General Rufus Saxton, was a supporter of the Freedmen and he worked to make the program successful [Emphasis added]. . . "
And this is where it becomes very easy to be a chief executive, even a president. You just support the people doing good stuff.
 

CalBear

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To be fair, he's not entirely wrong.

It's instructive to watch a couple of movies The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Gangs of New York. Yes, of course they are fiction but they are pretty realistic in bringing out just how much violence was accepted as normal in the mid-19C - levels of it that would be hard to imagine today. I came away from TAoHF wondering if the post-ACW South was all that much more violent than the ante-bellum one. It may have been, somewhat, but not as much as all that.
Did you actually suggest that two MOVIES, one based on a Mark Twain tale are a worth-while thing to study that JUSTIFIES the KKK? That the fact that society as a whole was more violent makes lynching, burning, rape, and wholesale murder done in the explicit cause of racism reasonable? That while it may be morally wrong to claim that Blacks are inferior to whites, you can not prove it is OBJECTIVELY wrong (which the kicked member stated, repeatedly)?

Seriously?
 
Did you actually suggest that two MOVIES, one based on a Mark Twain tale are a worth-while thing to study that JUSTIFIES the KKK? That the fact that society as a whole was more violent makes lynching, burning, rape, and wholesale murder done in the explicit cause of racism reasonable? That while it may be morally wrong to claim that Blacks are inferior to whites, you can not prove it is OBJECTIVELY wrong (which the kicked member stated, repeatedly)?

Seriously?


Who said anything about justifying the KKK or indeed justifying anything or anybody?

I merely noted that America in general and the South in particular was terrifically violent by modern standards, so that it would have been rather remarkable had the postwar South gone any other way than it did. That is not a moral judgment, merely an acknowledgement of reality.
 
And this is where it becomes very easy to be a chief executive, even a president. You just support the people doing good stuff.

Provided you do so in an area where the population is solidly Black.

Try it in a place with any substantial white population, and the Black landowners are apt to have trouble getting life insurance.
 

Stolengood

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For the record (since he's messaged me thanking me because he apparently misunderstood the above post), Yun-shuno's remark was that of a heinous Lost-Causer, and deservingly kick-worthy. Just so he doesn't misunderstand me again.
 

CalBear

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Who said anything about justifying the KKK or indeed justifying anything or anybody?

I merely noted that America in general and the South in particular was terrifically violent by modern standards, so that it would have been rather remarkable had the postwar South gone any other way than it did. That is not a moral judgment, merely an acknowledgement of reality.

Where?

To be fair, he's not entirely wrong.

That was in a reply to a member being kicked for supporting the KKK. You then referred to two MOVIES as your documentation.

That's where.
 
Provided you do so in an area where the population is solidly Black.

Try it in a place with any substantial white population, and the Black landowners are apt to have trouble getting life insurance.
wow, Frederick Douglas talked about three boxes which would help preserve freedom for newly freed slaves -- the voting box, the jury box, and the cartridge box for self-defense.

There have been military occupations which have worked out in human history, even nonbrutal occupations which have worked out.

And mention matter-of-factly but confidently that black soldiers served honorably. Matter-of-factly educate people on this without harping on it.
 

CalBear

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Jim Crow was inevitable so long as the Bourbon Democrats were preserved in some property and allowed to stay in the United States. Jim Crow, the elite response to the post-Original Klan multiracial populism of the late 19th century South, was geared not just to segregation and the recreation of Calhounian white solidarity, but to ensuring that poor blacks and poor whites, sharecroppers all, were essentially prevented from voting or participating in political life.

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.

Some white solidarity is, as a feature of American life, inevitable; it was the planters and the Southron rich, beaten but not broken, who won the peace, and who restored the particular forms of Calhounian Southron solidarity that have never been replicated in the North.
How is killing EVERY single officer just?

That is advocating mass murder.

See ya in 7.
 

CalBear

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Okay...

What the HELL?

Advocating mass murder, support for the KKK as just being a reaction to the times?

I'm closing what should have been a very low conflict thread before it turns into a full out bloodbath.
 
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