Reconstruction if freedmen better armed

OK, this thread is based on the NRA's proposition that, during Reconstruction, the freed blacks would've been better able to secure their new-won freedom had they been better-armed against their KKK & other white supremacist enemies- any thoughts ?
 
Well if freedmen had been better armed and banded together into organzied community defense forces of it might have made angry whites less likely to attack them. It certainly would have ratched up racial tensions but acts of large scale violence might have been reduced, or it could set a situation where large scale firefights happen with regularity.

I would argue that it would have made them more secure as most of the time the people who attacked were angry and just looking for someone weak and easy to target, if the people your used to pushing around are suddenly banded together and can fight back people usually aren't so keen on messing with them any more. In many parts of the South the freedmen outnumbered Whites so it might actually lead to retaliaion attacks and tit for tat conflicts.

I'm going need to ponder the ramifications of this, its actually an interesting idea.
 
Good one. Yeah sure, and what'd have happened to those poor buggers who shot a white man? Apart from that, y'all really think poor freedmen'd have the money to get decent guns? Them NRA fellows should've used the argument, that after the War of Northern Aggression, the downtrodden Southerners could've used more guns to deal with carpetbaggers and uppity n*****s.
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The guns could easily enough have bee procided by northern sympathisers, there were enough sloshing around after the war. The problem is, without some kind of fairly strong institutional support, armed blacks are still going to be chewed up by the local white population, organs of state, and ad-hoc militias. Some places with a signifiucant black majority might go the other way, but in most of the South this is more likely a recipe for rivers of blood than for successfully enforcing equality.

Now, putting the organs if military government and the reconstructed state at the back of the freedmen - that might work.
 
Good one. Yeah sure, and what'd have happened to those poor buggers who shot a white man? Apart from that, y'all really think poor freedmen'd have the money to get decent guns? Them NRA fellows should've used the argument, that after the War of Northern Aggression, the downtrodden Southerners could've used more guns to deal with carpetbaggers and uppity n*****s.
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I find this post darkly amusing, because you clearly have absolutely no idea about what the NRA was like during the post-Civil War period while you're taking random political potshots at them. I'm going to assume by your odd insistence that the NRA supported the Confederacy that you're unaware of the fact that the NRA was founded by Union veterans, and did make efforts to arm freedmen.
 
It could possible that the ensuing violence could lead to a much larger exodus of freedmen from the South to the North and West.

Also if the Federal Government backs the local Black populations its also possible that Whites could pack up a move away in order to get away from it, though I wonder if a long term low level insurgency movement of some kind could be born out of this with Black and White millitias killing one another with the Federal forces cracking down on all sides but more so on the radical White millitias.

I think the fighting would die down in the 1880's and 1890's as both sides are severly craked down on by the Federal Government.

In the long term you would have a region awash in arms and would have developed a culture of fear and violence even more so than OTL. This would mean that both Black and White populations would feel the need to get the biggest badest most modern guns to protect themselves from the other side, this could have seriously damaging effects for the long term in the whole region.
 
...your odd insistence that the NRA supported the Confederacy that you're unaware of the fact that the NRA was founded by Union veterans, and did make efforts to arm freedmen.

I think he was making an argument about the modern NRA, which is today strongest in states with high numbers of hunters. In Texas, for example, they announced an effort to have one million NRA members in the state. And this in an organization that "only" has four million members nationwide.

I haven't seen a source on state by state breakdown of their membership. If anyone has it please post.

I'd also be interested in a link to your source for saying the NRA armed Freedmen. If so, they didn't do it very well or on a very wide scale.

Ironically there is a kernel of truth in the NRA propaganda. Gun control was often aimed more squarely at nonwhites. So in a CSA-wins scenario, gun control vs nonwhites would be a widespread practice in that new nation.
 
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