Snake Featherston
Banned
"Obscene" or not, wasn't it a pretty foregone conclusion?
Can you name me a single instance (unless the Hebrews and Haiti count) of any set of masters and slaves who went directly from that relationship to one of full equality? It just doesn't happen.
As for 1877, I'm not sure what you mean. The south was very careful not to try and reverse the northern victory. They never made any move either to secede again or to revive slavery, or even the semi-slavery of the 1865 Black Codes. They left the Blacks as citizens, though very definitely second-class ones.
Oh, I know it was foregone. That doesn't make it any less an obscenity or a tragedy. If anything that's what makes the Civil War as traumatic as it was, as while slavery's end was foreordained in a long war equality would end up delayed, which in a democracy if there are states that grow used to having the majority of the population treated unequally.......
But OTL saw a terrorist insurrection in the South--that was crushed.
(Seriously, the KKK in South Carolina got wiped out. South Carolina!)
For a time. Then the paramilitaries showed up and were rather harder to suppress than the KKK. Grant was a very good President asfar as such things were concerned.
I think you're right that we should never underestimate anti-Union sentiment among Southerners in the wake of the Civil war, and land offerings might not be enough to keep them from taking their frustration out on the Freedmen.
I believe that with a more thorough effort from Washington, a redistribution could be accomplished. Of course somebody is going to lose their land, and I think the plantation owning class would be the sacrifice needed for an effective restructuring.
But wholehearted federal backing would probably mean more of a military-occupation flavoured(evenmore than OTL) Reconstruction.
The increased presence of troops and the military controlling much of the judicial system, could potentially fuel even more hatred for the Union.
So this could seem like another Catch-22.
That's the way I see it, the only means that would actually change things are means that no version of the 19th Century USA that would be recognizable with accept or tolerate.