How long can Carpetbagger and Scalawag rule hold in the South?

Which is why you break the 'White South' in 1865/1866, and keep a few battalions around for enforcement if anyone gets too uppity.

Seriously, with the power of the planters and antebellum politicians broken, and a good number of them in exile, with the rest being destitute or dead, well, it'd be freedmen and peckerwoods running the show no matter how you look at it.


What do you mean by "freedmen and peckerwoods"? They are not even remotely likely to be on the same side. When the planters did lose power, toward the turn of the century, the poorer whites who supplanted them were considerably more racist, not less. Presumably the same would be true if the change had come a generation earlier.
 

katchen

Banned
The populists were making headway in some parts of the South in educating poor Scots-Irish whites to see that they and African Americans had a common class enemy (or at least common strategic competitor) in the upper classes. A big part of the racist Redeemer strategy was heading off that from happening. And from ante-bellum times to present day "astro-turf" tea party conservatives, it's amazing to me how successful that strategy has been.
 
The populists were making headway in some parts of the South in educating poor Scots-Irish whites to see that they and African Americans had a common class enemy (or at least common strategic competitor) in the upper classes. A big part of the racist Redeemer strategy was heading off that from happening. And from ante-bellum times to present day "astro-turf" tea party conservatives, it's amazing to me how successful that strategy has been.


But on your TL the old upper class has supposedly been destroyed, so what common enemy do blacks and poor whites now have?

Also, just how do you envisage such a policy coming about? OTL, the Republicans didn't even disfranchise ex-Rebs for any length of time, much less dispossess them. [1] BTW, considerable amounts of land were in any case forfeited for non-payment of taxes, but this didn't help the Freedmen much. The State governments - even Republican ones - needed the money and so had to sell the land rather than give it away - and few freedmen had the means to buy.



[1] The House version of the 14th Amendment provided for the disfranchisement of leading ex-Rebs, but only until 1870, which would have made little long-term difference. Yet even that was too extreme for the Senate, who changed it to disqualification from office - which in turn was rescinded by two-thirds votes of a still firmly Republican Congress as early as 1872.
 
But on your TL the old upper class has supposedly been destroyed, so what common enemy do blacks and poor whites now have?

Breaking the political dominance of a group does not mean they go away, unless the US was willing to institute radical land reform to put the former slaves in charge of their plantations they're still going to exist as a class.
 
Breaking the political dominance of a group does not mean they go away, unless the US was willing to institute radical land reform to put the former slaves in charge of their plantations they're still going to exist as a class.


Exactly - and if they retain their land, they will most likely retain (or soon recover) their political dominance. Once the Union Army has shrunk back to antebellum levels, what is there to stop this?

FTM, even with a massive Union military presence, Reconstruction would likely have been stillborn but for the sulky refusal of many whites to vote in the 1867 State elections - presumably because they thought it beneath their dignity to vote alongside negroes, and preferred to sulk in their tents in the hope of a Democratic victory in next year's presidential race. Had they swallowed their pride and voted, probably only a minority of Southern states would ever have had Radical governments.

Afaics, OTL's Reconstruction achieved most if not all of what could have been achieved, by enacting Constitutional amendments which would gave the Federal government power to uphold black rights, if and when northern public opinion was willing to do so. More than that was never likely.
 

Kaptin Kurk

Banned
You would need both changes in Black and White thought for this to be possible. The mainline thought of both blacks and whites during the Civil War / Reconstruction period was basically intergrationists. This logic would inevitably be subverted by the white south, because it would produce decreasing returns for the all important white majority as time went by...(a white majority which a dispersed black populace would remain heavily reliant upon for protection.)

For economic reasons which would be hard to surmount, a Black state, or black reservations were never considered. However, if the ACS (American Colonization Society) philosophy could have been morphed into some sort of black state philosophy, under the U.S. Constitutional Framework, you might have been able to defer or even delete the Southern Redemption.

Not sure this would have been better in the long run, but you'd have to have some force, and some place, both northern white republicans and black freemen though blacks could move to...and have this place be politically strengthened...at least in the house and probably in the senate as well...by racial consentration.

It might have led to some sort of final solution elswhere, but it's be harder to effect a historical "Southern Redemption" if, say, Republicans had decided to ammend the Constitution to make Mississippi a Fremen's State or something like that. Either way, both white Radical Republicans, and Black Freemen, would of had to have viewed blacks themselves less as citizens but more as northern clients for such a scenario to work, as its the only scenario in which the military force required to resist the whites of the south could have been developed and maintaind from the black populace principally.

I.E., blacks in this country would have basically had to become Maroons.
 
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