Truly Equal USA Post Civil War End To Slavery.

Perhaps Marxism makes headway in the South after the war.... There were already German Marxists in Texas before 1860. They had a lot of enemies, of course. The primary public opposition to them was due to their abolitionist stance. Could they have won more acceptance, perhaps in alliance with the Northern occupation?

That doesn't work either. Marxism to exist in any appreciable sense requires the kind of economic changes the Confederacy was created in 11 of the 15 slave states to forestall. If that happens then the question is moot as there won't be a Civil War in the first place.
 
Have Lincoln survive and become convinced somehow that "economic slavery" is tantamount to actual slavery. His prestige strengthens his hand to get his way in appointing those who share his newly radicalised views. He argues that the planters have forsaken the rights to their land due to slavery and rebellion. It is confiscated by the federal government and given to blacks and poor whites alike, forging a political coalition despite mistrust. The two groups between them have a political majority they wouldn't have if they divided. This keeps them together while other state-level acts are passed, in a "you get A if we get B" manner that screws the wealthy further. This includes much better education for blacks, and, combined with land wealth, allows an embryonic black middle class to form a century earlier than OTL. Examples of genteel "civilised" blacks breaks the stereotype of illiterate brutes.
 
No way are the authorities in the North going to ally with Marxists.

There was labour trouble in the North at this time, and anything of that nature would have been viewed as thoroughly subversive.

Maybe if Lincoln isn't assassinated? He and Karl Marx had a somewhat friendly correspondence.
 
I'm surprised everyone's going for pie in the sky ideals. Focus on simpler things, like an equal (even if seperate) education system, run nationally by the federal government; destroy the southern paramilitaries which crushed the blacks; etc.
 
I'm surprised everyone's going for pie in the sky ideals. Focus on simpler things, like an equal (even if seperate) education system, run nationally by the federal government; destroy the southern paramilitaries which crushed the blacks; etc.
1) separate but equal isn't. I'm sure it is theoretically possible for a 'separate but equal' education system to exist (the Protestant vs Catholic school boards in e.g. Quebec may be the closest example), but not when you have one group who is convinced of their superiority and has all the power. If you DON'T have that with whites and blacks, then you don't need 'separate but equal'. I'm not going to call it ASB, but I can't imagine a way to make it work.

2) "run nationally by the federal government" that would be unconstitutional.

3) "destroy the southern paramilitaries which crushed the blacks". Hoo boy. How? Permanent occupation with Federal Troops?

no, these are, in no way, shape or form, 'simple' solutions.

I think the reason 'pie in the sky' solutions are being proposed is that the challenge is so incredibly difficult it takes something like that.

Sorry.
 
Lincoln kept a Senator from IIRC Connecticut waiting because Frederick Douglass was ahead of him in the queue. He took to referring to Douglass as "my friend" and ate dinner with him -- something that wouldn't be repeated in the Whitehouse for more than 40 years.

Of course these wouldn't have been noteworthy if it were not for racism in the North. OTOH, any president attempting to do this between 1875 and 1895 would have been destroyed politically. Any one of those acts would have provoked riots.

The wheels came off during reconstruction which was neither thorough enough to enable black communities to defend themselves or gradualist enough to enable a peaceful transition. The problem was it was lead intellectually by radical abolitionists who were reliant on the racist majority to actually carry it out.

What was needed was what's today called expectations management -- preparation of the Northern public for reconstruction as a long-term and expensive but rewarding project. I'd guess a 3% of GDP tax and 2-year 200,000 draft for 15 years would have done it -- a small price to pay to have Atlanta and Mobile developed to the extent of Northeastern cities by 1920.

Lincoln could have carried it off, though it wouldn't have been guaranteed.
 
The constitutional gridlock was largely a product of the North-South divide itself. Reconstruction was also a window of opportunity for constitutional transformation.
 
expectations management -- preparation of the Northern public for reconstruction as a long-term and expensive but rewarding project. I'd guess a 3% of GDP tax and 2-year 200,000 draft for 15 years would have done it -- a small price to pay to have Atlanta and Mobile developed to the extent of Northeastern cities by 1920.

Lincoln could have carried it off, though it wouldn't have been guaranteed.


Lincoln cancelled the 1865 Draft call as soon as he received the news of Appomattox. He didn't even wait for the other rebel armies to surrender, much less consider continuing any draft into peacetime.

The other stuff sounds even more ASB-ish. The taxpayer had quite enough on his plate just paying for the war. Extra taxes for rebuilding the South (black or white) would be a complete non-runner, under Lincoln or anyone else.
 
Well I kind of assumed a commitment of 3% of GDP and hundreds of thousands of troops was a colossal undertaking. At a guess that's the sort of effort that would have been required, however.

Whatever about the draft, the USA made extensive preparations for war against Mexico in the summer of 1865, so the wind down wasn't immediate. The (fulfilled) hope was that supplies and weapons backed up by the threat of irresistible force would be enough to doom the Emperor.

If the peace was to be won, then 1865 was only the half way point. In the real world, when Woodrow Wilson (busy segregating the Federal Government) attended the Sons of the Confederate Veterans get together, so many senators and congressmen were in attendance that observers wondered who had in fact won the war.
 
If the peace was to be won, then 1865 was only the half way point. In the real world, when Woodrow Wilson (busy segregating the Federal Government) attended the Sons of the Confederate Veterans get together, so many senators and congressmen were in attendance that observers wondered who had in fact won the war.


The peace was won.

It was 1912 before another man of southern birth reached the White House, and 1928 before a pol in a southern state was nominated even for Vice-President. The high protective tariffs, which favoured northern interests over southern, remained in place for generations. Northern settlers could move west without fear of competition even (to any great extent) from free blacks, let alone from slaves. Northern states were not required to deport black refugees back to the south.

In short, every point of disagreement between north and south was settled in favour of the north. That is precisely why the southerners got away with undoing reconstruction - because they never challenged the northern vistory on any point that really mattered.
 
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