More Successful Reconstruction?

Could the Reconstruction of the South have been more successful and been able to integrate blacks at least partially an equal level with whites without having to station federal troops permanently? If this happened what would have been the results of an earlier legal racial equality in the nation?
 
Not without going into ASB country like wholesale property confiscation - and even that might not work.

Basic trouble is that Southern Whites were determined to suppress Black political rights - while northern whites didn't feel half so strongly about enforcing them. Civil rights didn't really get a second wind until the Cold War, when the US and SU were in competition for the support of non-white ex-colonies in Asia and Africa - a situation in which the Southern racial set up became an intolerable handicap about which Something Must Be Done. It's very hard to picture a 19C equivalent of that.
 
Agreed. My view is that you need to somehow get to a point where there are lots of black dominated areas within the South that are sufficiently well organised, armed, educated, organised (etc) that they are able to resist the post Reconstruction roll back, with only very little or no support from the Federal Government. If they have to rely on Washington for active support then they are probably doomed.

Quite how you would get to this point is the problem.
 
A major problem is that proper reconstruction did not start for a couple of years. The old regime was allowed to take power.

In the immediate aftermath of the war Southern whites would have found resistence harder.

Especially if confiscation of land was linked to some kind or exile for the planter class.

Peopel with economic security are harder to intimidate. Had former slave had land and the treasonous class that most benefited from human property had bee ndestroyed as a class (without needing to jail or harm any individual) the situation would have been different
 
A major problem is that proper reconstruction did not start for a couple of years. The old regime was allowed to take power.

In the immediate aftermath of the war Southern whites would have found resistence harder.

Resistance to what?

The only things anyone required of the South prior to 1867 were acceptance of the Union and abolition of slavery.

They never disputed the former and their reservations about the latter became clear only with the passage of the Black Codes in the winter of 1865/6. Even then, it took a further 18 months for Congress even to buy into granting freedmen the vote. At no time were fantasies about land redistribution even close to being on the agenda.

Especially if confiscation of land was linked to some kind or exile for the planter class.

Please could we come back to earth?

Confiscation was never going to be "linked" to anything because it was never even remotely likely to happen. See above.

As for exile, please note that even the limited disfranchisements and disqualifications were abandoned by 1872 - at a time when Congress was still heavily Republican, it produced a two-thirds vote in both houses to rescind them. So even the limited sanctions of OTL were half-hearted and short-lived. So where are the votes supposed to come from to exile anybody?
 
Blacks were not going to be given racial equality in neither North or South. There was too much bigotry and hard feelings. And redistribution would only make it worse for them.
 
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