I'll quote an old soc.history.what-if post of mine on this subject:
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Briefly, Stevens wanted the
confiscation of all "rebel" estates of over $10,000 or 200 acres. The
redistribution would give 40 acres to each adult male freedman. What
was left over would be sold to the highest bidder and the proceeds used for
pensions for Union soldiers, partial retirement of the national debt, etc.
Would it have worked? One of the few extended essays in counterfactual
history by a distinguished historian, C. Vann Woodward's "Reconstruction: A
Counterfactual Playback" (in his book _The Future of the Past_) gives good
reasons for skepticism, which I will summarize here:
First, the same Congress that was contemplating helping the freedmen
also made a great show of helping farmers get free land in the west
through the Homestead and other acts. We know the result of that--the
homesteaders got screwed. Land-grant railroads alone got four times as
much land as the homesteaders, and of the patents actually granted to
homesteaders a great many were handed to pawns of speculators and
monopolists. What land bona fide homesteaders *did* get was typically
the worst.
Is there any reason to expect things to have been different in the
South? Remember that nine-tenths of the 394 million acres of "rebel"
land were slated for sale to the highest bidder. This was certainly an
invitation to speculators and monopolists, who might have gotten all the
best land, leaving the freedmen with the worst.
What's more, Congress actually did pass a Southern Homestead Act. There
were 47,700,000 acres of public land in five of the Confederate states in
1861--more than the amount of land set aside for the freedmen under the
hypothetical Stevens Act. The 1866 Southern Homestead Act passed by the
Radicals theoretically made it possible for homesteaders to get *80*
acres--and the Act favored freedmen by excluding ex-Confederates from
homesteading priviliges. Nevertheless, very few ex-slaves participated.
Lack of credit and transportaion are probably to blame for this. Perhaps
the Stevens bill would not have involved as great transportation costs for
the freedmen--they presumably could get the land they had already worked
(although determining just who gets what land would be a considerable
administrative problem, and the people doing the administering would be
white). But there would still be the problem of credit. Land is not
enough. Farmers would, after all, need some money to get by until the
first harvest was in; they would need tools; and they would need some
experience in managing a small farm (I don't think the experience gained by
being part of a work-gang on a plantation is the same thing).
Perhaps the Freedmen's Bureau or some other agencies could have helped
the freedmen to get these things but one questions whether northern
taxpayers, who might be happy enough about confiscating "rebel" estates,
would be willling to finance such help.
And as Woodward points out, some of the very officials who would
adminster the act to guarantee land for black people in the South were
the ones who were supposed to do the same for American Indians in the
West. General Howard, who had headed the Freedmen's Bureau, later
negotiated a treaty with the Apaches. General Sherman moved from
command of the Southern District to the Western District. The result of
course was that white supremacy won out as completely in Arizona as in
Alabama.
Finally, what Woodward really dwells on is the problem of white
resistance--boycotts of the black farmers, outright terror, pressure to
sell farms to white people at nominal prices. In short, the same
pressures that "persuaded" blacks not to exercise rights like voting
would have worked in the area of land ownership as well. Woodward has
some sarcastic fun imagining the most Draconian or "Stalinist" measures
conceivable aginst southern white supremacists and their northen
Copperhead friends. He notes that perhaps Alaska, providentially
purchased from the Russians, could be our Siberia, but doubts that even
this would be enough to deal with millions of people. Anyway, his real
point is that even the Radicals would never have accepted the bloodshed
he thinks an attempt to force land redistribution would cause.
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