Speakung of Union politics has lincoln's radicalization than otl effected any policies other than civil war and reconstruction?
The thing is, in a war such as this one, where the survival of the Union itself is at stake, most government policies are almost completely geared towards wartime needs and Reconstruction plans. There's few policies outside of these. I guess the only relevant one is in regards to Native Americans, but I have said little or nothing about their situation due to a lack of knowledge and a lack of sources. The only thing that's been established for sure is that the lamentable Dakota War was mostly averted because Lincoln decided to rush in supplies, afraid to open another front when dealing with a worse situation in the South.
You know given how there's going to be continued insurgency from the south even after it surrenders. I wonder if that'll change the US historical attitude of a large army 90 years early. Depending on how bad it gets the Union might just decide the south will always need some military presence in it to keep the racists at bay. That would really have some knock on effects with the rest of the world as a US with even a decent sized army that's competently trained would have to be factored into things.
I envision some sort of permanent Federal presence in the South in the form of a gendarmerie or Army outposts, because undoubtedly some kind of Federal enforcement in the face of the resistance of White Southerners will be necessary for years, if not decades, to come. I don't know what effects it could have in European calculations, however. Some discussions on this thread seem to point towards the experience of this Civil War making the US more isolationist; others believe it could justify more imperialism. I'm not too sure myself, since my focus is on the domestic scene.
That seems likely and a US with a powerful military much earlier is going to be reckoned a peer much sooner by the Europeans. They’ll steamroll the Spanish even quicker than OTL here.
And if they intervene in any WW1, it would be in a more military rather than logistical capacity too.
I still believe that the greatest contribution of the US to any European war would be, at least at first, logistical and material. Even at its most extreme I don't think the US would keep a standing army of a million men like the European states did. And like
@Arnold d.c points out, such a force is bound to be more like a police body than an Army ready for military operations.
Anglo-Saxon Social Model, which used this US as inspiration, does have America as a great military power much earlier than OTL; it's involved with WWI from the very beginning due to its alliance with France
Wait a second, how did I just find out about this? A TL based, at least partially, on my vision for the US is a great compliment. And it was made by
@Rattigan, who I know followed the TL (not sure if they still do), and I am just learning this now.
I wonder if Liberia will have a different fate thanks to a different post-war US.
Also, if this version of the US will be less racist, does that mean the vote to annex the Dominican Republic will pass?
en.wikipedia.org
The US, in my research, seems to have stopped caring about Liberia after it was concluded that colonization of freedmen was unpracticable. There were some efforts on the part of Black Americans to migrate to Liberia after Reconstruction collapsed, so I guess that will be butterflied, but those efforts never managed to move a truly massive amount of people.
I frankly want to just butterfly the whole mess. I loathe American imperialism in my Latin America, and the fiasco actually helped to revitalize racism somewhat.
Of course, the United States could instead cast about and create a national police much earlier than OTL. This may converge somewhat, if this is seen as being part of the Army (i.e., a gendarmerie), though I'm not sure a gendarmerie will attract much positive sentiment from Europeans.
All that said, I thought that the occupation of the South was going to be handled by a newly formed Civil Guard/Gendarmerie rather than the US Army. It will be interesting to see how they handle Southern resentment. On one hand, they eventually have to win over/convince Southerners that cooperating with them is the best bet. On the other hand, they have to have a big enough stick to make good their power. It could end up that the Gendarmerie becomes a pseudo-army or even a National Guard equivalent ITTL.
Yes! More on that in the next update!
I wonder if policing will be way different considering how slavery influenced policing practices. With a better Reconstruction, I suspect that some of the nastiest problems of policing, especially the racism part, might be butterflied. That and people doing forced labor for "crimes" (which was totally not a loophole in the 13th amendment used to continue slavery at all).
I'll be frank and say that I've always believed that the discourse surrounding the 13th amendment is disingenuous and always translates modern ideas into the past. It is something that frustrates me, because every single time it is mentioned there's someone saying "Oh, they intentionally made prisoners slaves, you see, to continue slavery". But if you think about it, it doesn't make any sense. If the Congressmen who approved the amendment wanted to retain slavery in any way or form, they could have just not passed the amendment at all. If they wanted to continue slavery, why would they do so in a weak, watered-down form instead of simply continuing slavery as it was? Moreover, people act as if the framers of the amendment were the same people who were then down south using prisoners as slaves. No, the Southerners who used prison labor and the provisions of the Black codes to try and approximate slavery did so in defiance of the amendment's spirit and the intentions of its framers. When Congress realized this, they acted by starting Radical Reconstruction, and Southerners only were able to use prison labor in large scale when Reconstruction collapsed altogether. The Republicans in Congress and the Democrats of the South were not in cahoots to continue slavery, they were at odds, and if the Southerners had to recur to the "loophole" it was because the amendment was effective in destroying actual chattel slavery. Finally, I just can't help but feel that saying that prisoners are still slaves minimizes the horros of slavery. Don't get me wrong, prison labor is a horrible practice that should be ended, but there's a great chasm between it and ante-bellum slavery in scope, practice and conception.
Sorry for the rant. There's nothing wrong with your comment, and I appreciate your contribution. This answer isn't meant for you specifically, but it's rather me expressing my view on a relevant issue for the TL - my version of the 13th amendment still includes the "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" part, not as a loophole but rather for the same reasons it was there in OTL: because it was in the Northwest Ordinance and Republicans wanted to harken back to it.
Unlikely. Racist cops are a global problem, not just an American or even Anglosphere issue.
At the end of the day any law enforcement agency is more concerned with the maintenance of order and the defense of the State's interests than with seeking justice or protecting people. As long as racism remains a problem in the US, it will remain a problem in its police. That said, this US is going to be less racist, so the situation should be somewhat better. Obviously not perfect, because things never are.
Well, in the mid-19th century they say a third of New York City's police were irish. This won't happen on the national scale but I would think there could be some localities where even a larger percentage of the police force was black. If that was the case then it would at least reduce the problem. Maybe even in the major Northern city. Chicago is still smaller and growing and as a young burgeoning City that might be a solution to keep it from becoming really segregated like it became in our timeline. Make sure that the police were more evenly distributed. Who would be a good Chicago / Illinois leader who could work on that I wonder?
But yes, sadly, this is a global problem because it is a problem of the heart. It is one of those ways in which the verse is so apt that "man's heart is deceitfully wicked; who can know it?"
The best bet is to get the idea across that the police are there to protect and not to enforce. Or something like that. A few years ago I read that this was the difference between the British police and American but I don't remember the exact quote.
In many parts of the South, at the height of Reconstruction, entire police departments and its authorities were Black. With a more successful Reconstruction, the view of police could radically shift, from something to "maintain order", to an exercise in community development and protection.