Maybe more African Americans would go to Liberia and many more private ventures to start a colony by African Americans. Maybe that would help Liberia much as they needed settlers in that time. As its not till the True Whigs in Liberia came to power in the 1870s which advocated and pushed for a more aggressive native integration to Americo Liberian society and internal colonization of Liberia. This might save the Republican party of Liberia from collapsing as this would give them a leverage to focus more on the settlers instead of the aggressive integration, assimilation and internal colonization advocated by the True Whigs. As the expected settlers did not arrive
DBWI: What if Lincoln was successfully assassinated?
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
Ahh, the old slave south, where 'cuz slavery' makes the usually anti-communist (and definitely anti-tankie) mass opinion of SHWI go full throated in support of liquidation of kulaks as a class and Maoist style land reform. Probably even some folk who see mostly downside to post-Apartheid South Africa and post-Rhodesia in 20th & 21st century.
And I don't understand your point about South Africa and Zimbabwe (Rhodesia is stupid and thankfully dead).
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
Not at all.
I simply haven't forgotten that designating a social class, really, 10s or 100s of thousands of individual US citizens, as beyond the protection of due process, the constitution and bill of rights, and depriving them of the same property enjoyed by other US citizens, based on their mere categorization as members of a 'social class' [wealthy planters, slaveowners] not based on court proven criminal actions by individuals losing the property, is unconstitutional and un-American. It is however, quite Communist to do so, particularly as practiced by Stalin, Mao, Ho, and others.
Picking a class arbitrarily, like, say, wealthy planters, and confiscating its real estate property and political franchise based on its history of property holdings (land and slave) alone would not pass muster as fitting within the constitution of the United States in the 1860s and likely not the 1990s or 2010s either, in any court. It could not and did not pass muster of winning majority support in a Republican dominated Congress. It would not be a measure of reconstructing the Union under the constitution. It would be a new revolution, having to legitimize itself on an entirely unprecedented basis.
The number of politicians ready to sign up for that, armed men ready to enforce than, and taxpayers ready vote for and pay for the first two against inevitable resistance in the 1860s would have been quite small.
I am quite unsympathetic to the south, but there was no way, without constitutional suspension and an autocratic regime, and declaration of a subset of US citizens as rights-less 'enemy combatants' a la Gitmo, to do a mass redistribution of private lands.
Additionally, while as a someone who is a cultural yankee, various southern political fashions over time, including 19th century slave power, fire-eater-ism, secessionism, and 20th century massive resistance and the 'southern strategy', and more trends since then make its political culture feel 'other' to me, there is a limit to how far the 'othering' of other American citizens can and will go, and should go.
After all, the south in having slavery wasn't having internal laws and practices that didn't exist in the northern states as well just two generations before the Civil War. The northern states, to their credit (or reduced shame), abolished slavery on their own, but manumission in the north was not accompanied with any form of punishment for slaveowners. In fact many in the north charged their slaves for own freedom. Other northern masters didn't free their slaves at all but instead made sure to sell their slaves while it was still legal to do so to southern jurisdictions where the practice lasted longer. They made sure they and their heirs kept the profits. Post-manumission in the north, northerners remained economically complicit and entwined with southern slavery in a thousand ways great and small, but none of their lands, profits or revenues gained or improved as result were made subjected to confiscation or punitive taxation. Should the southern ones have been treated vastly differently for their slave system lasting longer?
Hmmm makes sense. It just makes me sad that the post-Civil War era gains for former slaves were so easily obliterated, which is even worse when you consider that what we had was an actual best-case scenario for Reconstruction... that radicalizes many people on this site to (rightly or wrongly) blame the planter class for all of those losses.
The losses were almost certainly a foregone conclusion anyway.
Keep in mind that as late as Nov 1864, and with the South not participating, 44% of votes were cast for a party which was willing to let the South keep *slavery* (not just Jim Crow) simply for returning to the Union. Also, quite a few of the Lincoln votes were probably down to men who considered him a better war leader, and cast in spite of his opposition to slavery rather than because of it. People who thought like that weren't likely to champion Black rights for any length of time.