What would be the most successful post-civil war reconstruction possible?

Within the realm of not veering into ASB territory what is the most successful outcome you can envision for the reconstruction period as compared to OTL?
 
Crucially it needs to be done early, in the instant aftermath of Confederate defeat and Lincoln's murder.

The planter class needs to be destroyed.

I suspect a Constitutional amendment specially guaranteeing rights in the former rebel states for former slaves
 
What are ASB and OTL?
(new to this forum)

ASB - Alien Space Bats, a term used to mean events or Timelines that are outright impossible or absolutely improbable regarding historical or natural events (example: an entire country is suddenly displaced in Time and Space by some unexplained phenomena).

OTL - Our Timeline, that is, everything that happened Historically.

Welcome to the forum, you might want to check this page to grasp some stuff to comprehend the basics: http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/alternate_history_faq
 
What are ASB and OTL?
(new to this forum)

OTL stands for Our Time Line. It means history as it actually happened. a similar term is TTL, which stands for This Time Line, used to refer to the timeline (a timeline is a certain history, alternate or otherwise) being referred to.
ASB stands for Alien Space Bat(s). They are a fictional creature that supposedly brings about impossible (e.g. supernatural, etc.) occurrences. It's also used to refer to Geographical changes (e.g. different continents are formed, etc.) and differences in evolutionary development (e.g. humans never evolve or a canine adapts to an aquatic lifestyle).
Another term you'll see around AH.com (AH is of course short for AlternateHistory) is POD, which is Point of Divergence. The POD is whatever goes differently to start a timeline going differently from ours.

I hope this help. :)

Edit: I believe this is the first time I was ninja'd. :p Good point about the wiki, too. The wiki has a bunch of good resources about both alternate history and AlternateHistory.com. I definately recommend it.
 
The human beings newly freed from slavery should be provided with a good, solid middle-class acreage of land,

which they have more than earned through years of physical labor.
 
The human beings newly freed from slavery should be provided with a good, solid middle-class acreage of land,

which they have more than earned through years of physical labor.

They should be protected from taxation. Unfair taxes were always used to steal what little capital had been build up. Maybe make them immune from property taxes for a century or so? Or only make black people pay federal taxes? Not sure.

Btw, I always read ASB as Alien Space Baby. I encountered the term right after watching Space Odyssey. :)
 
"40 acres and a mule" I believe was the phrase for what the freed slaves should have received. You can do a lot of things to break the planter class (and a good PoD is likely anyone other than Andrew Johnson as VP) the real problem, is making it stick. It'll take a generation of protecting black rights to get a critical fraction of the South used to respecting those rights as "normal" and by 1876 OTL, the North had had it's fill of policing the South.
 
"40 acres and a mule" I believe was the phrase for what the freed slaves should have received. You can do a lot of things to break the planter class (and a good PoD is likely anyone other than Andrew Johnson as VP) the real problem, is making it stick. It'll take a generation of protecting black rights to get a critical fraction of the South used to respecting those rights as "normal" and by 1876 OTL, the North had had it's fill of policing the South.

As for prolonging Northern interest, maybe somehow avoid the Depression of 1873. That sapped most of their energy. One possibility as to how this could be done is to have a southerner assassinate Grant, removing an inevitably bad president and stiffening Northern resolve in one go.
 
Within the realm of not veering into ASB territory what is the most successful outcome you can envision for the reconstruction period as compared to OTL?

First, avoid the assassination of Lincoln.

No one can be precisely clear about how Lincoln would have conducted Reconstruction; he had not stated any general plan he intended to follow, and his views on what sort of things should happen seemed to be in flux when he was killed.

But it is certain that he would not have followed the policy of Andrew Johnson in supporting "Conservative Reconstruction" in 1865-1866.

For one thing, CR was a project of the Democratic Party in the South. With the collapse of the national Whig Party, Southern Whigs had turned to the "American" Party in 1856 and then the "Constitutional Union" Party in 1860. The CUP drew 40% of the vote in the future Confederate states, and 35% in the Deep South, so the ex-Whig vote was significant, but had no institutional substance.

The goal of CR was to entrench white supremacy in state and local government, and also control by pretty much the same crowd that had led the secession movement and the Confederacy - predominantly Democrats. This turned out to be OK with Johnson, who was a Democrat, even though it also meant exclusion of wartime Unionists. Lincoln, a Whig turned Republican, would have had a different view.

IMO, Lincoln would have started to work immediately to establish the Republican Party in the South. He would have looked among the former Whigs of the region for men to appoint to Federal offices as well as among Unionists. I think he would have proposed some Federally sponsored efforts toward physical "Reconstruction" - of railroads, bridges, roads, canals, and other infrastructure damaged in the war, with perhaps some new infrastructure that was most obviously a good idea.

These two patronage tools would enable him to recruit respectable Southerners to join the Republican Party, as well as provide an electoral program with appeal to many white Southerners. OTL, Johnson opposed such efforts to the end of his term in 1869 His successor, Grant, was utterly inexperienced in politics and made little use of Federal power to promote Republican Party in the South.

Where does this lead? IMHO, to Republican competion for white Southerners' allegiance almost as soon as the shooting stopped.

This would also lead Lincoln to address the other big issue - the white supremacist element of CR. Lincoln had said that he thought at least some blacks should be voters. OTL, the race issue split Southern Republicans between "Lily Whites" who echoed the Democrat position on white supremacy, which was far more popular with whites, and "Black and Tans" who favored black enfranchisement, which brought the Republicans large numbers of black votes. In the Deep South, black votes alone could win elections.

The question is whether Lincoln could find some middle ground for the Republicans. He suggested limited enfranchisement of blacks, but never got around to addressing what the limits could be, or whether they would be considered intrinsically temporary. Because anything more than a minimal token black vote meant eventual black control of many local governments and even of some states. This would be offensive to most whites' sensibilities, but not universally intolerable - if it was made very gradual, and was sweetened with the Federal patronage goodies noted above.

OTL saw a wild seesaw: Conservative Reconstruction in 1865-68, Congressionally mandated "Radical Reconstruction" in 1868-1874 (with immediate full enfrachisement of blacks), and white supremacist takeover of state governments by "Redeemers" backed by Klan terror in 1875-1877.

Could Lincoln have started a gradual process of black enfranchisement? That's what gets really hard, because it would require establishing a process that would continue for decades. Slow-boiling a frog is a lot harder when the frog knows he's being boiled, and even has some control over the fire.

So - best possible outcome? Lincoln succeeds in recruiting a lot of Southern Republicans, and also insists on an initial token black vote. This vote is solidly Republican, and useful to white Southern Republicans while not threatening to white Southerners in general. Only white candidates are allowed at first.

Over the next generation, Southern Republicans find they have an interest in expanding black voting. This would not necessarily provoke white outrage; OTL Memphis political boss E. H. Crump used black votes in the early 1900s.

Black votes for Republicans are also more acceptable because the Republicans have won more white support through patronage and public works. Thus there are more white Republican voters who appreciate black votes for their candidates.

By 1880 or so, a few token blacks have been elected to harmless offices - a few seats in state legislatures or on county commissions, and minor executive offices. (But never any position with authority over whites.)

Also (as in OTL) blacks are included in law enforcement, but only over other blacks. There are counties that are 80% and 90% black, and so in these counties, black LEOs form most of the force. By 1900, it becomes acceptable to have an occasional black head of law enforcement in these counties, with the tacit understanding that only white LEOs have authority over whites, a rule that is gradually relaxed regarding "white trash".

I see I have gone far beyond the scope of the OP's query, so I'm cutting off here.
 
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Reconfigure the states so some states are black majority. Those states would be unlikely to fall to Jim Crow, and eventually that would spread.

No forgiveness for Confederate politicians and destroying the planter class as needed.
 
Reconfigure the states so some states are black majority. Those states would be unlikely to fall to Jim Crow, and eventually that would spread.

Mississippi and South Carolina, among other, had already a healthy Black majority and, while I could see the acceptance of splitting West Virginia from Virginia, I don't see how to make public opinion accept the creation of Black-majority States sending Black Senators and Representents.

No forgiveness for Confederate politicians and destroying the planter class as needed.

While long-term disenfranchissement of Confederate politicians - which could be obtained by trying them for treason, for those getting less than death or pardoned -, I don't see how the SCOTUS could accept the expropriation of even a part of the landed estates of the Southern gentry, nor do I see how to keep the Ku Klux Klan from making freedmen "agree" to sell for 1$ their land to the planter class.
 
Well the choice given to former planter class traitors is trial for treason of a deal with exile and giving your land to the folk you once owned. It would not even come to Court
 
These threads always get acrimonious because the short answer: it's very hard to get a good Reconstruction, and addressing the reasons why, the historical reasons why, offends some people.

First, a good Reconstruction is one where a large number of the enslaved can establish themselves in a solid, unassailable middle class such that the removal of Federal support does not mean their gains evaporate that they do in OTL. Their are two paths to this, and the difficulty is that both are outside of the political ideology or will of the the late 19th Century USA. The first is OTL, but longer. Federal troops are present in the South for longer, and in larger numbers. This is hard because the will wasn't there, and many Northern political leaders balked at the level of coercion needed. Look up Sheridan in Louisiana for an example of this. So this seems unlikely, even if we don't get into the sub argument that Reconstruction, when you consider the history of black people as equal to those of whites, as the South winning through terrorism what they could not win on the battlefield.

The other alternative would be wide scale land reform. The estates of the aristocracy are broken up and granted to freedmen. This is the better option, but the desire for some form of reconciliation, and the general view of private property in the post-war USA makes this hard as well, even if Lincoln lives.

The Second reason, is that the scale of the problem is truly massive. The reason these threads get bitter, is that many of us prefer to look at the actual history of this period when it comes to the scale of the effort required. The level of resistance to seeing black as equal citizens in the region of the country we are talking about is massive, and cannot be minimized by a serious student of history. The subservient status of African Americans is so deep in the cultural DNA of the South that any Reconstruction has to be profound.

Entire movements of national politics, from the Solid South to the Southern Strategy, have been built on it, from 1876 to the present day.(1) Entire cultural movements based on the idea of a raging enemy in our midst that requires constant vigilance and must be stopped can be traced to this. (2) Heck, you can argue that the only thing more frightening than freedmen in that part of the country was the idea of middle-class freedmen. (3) Point being, a black middle-class after Reconstruction has to be large enough to have a seat at the table, and strong enough to survive "massive resistance".(4)

So the short version? Reconstruction succeeding requires it producing a black middle class that is large, economically viable, and capable of surviving a sustained, low-intensity shooting war. There is a lack of Northern political will to do this, and it is facing a reservoir of Southern political will to oppose that survives in some places to this day. The fact that some of these attitudes where mirrored in the North also explains why the US government lacked the will to exert themselves for the freedmen.


(1) The political history of the evangelical right in the 1970s provides an highly enlightening history of this as well. The reason why many Southern states supported national Prohibition, and state level prohibition after national Prohibition faded, also does provides a bridge between these two examples. It must be noted that the racism that fueled these was often far from a strictly Southern thing.

(2) The sea change in the NRA after 1965 provides an enlightening, and stunning, example of this, but is off topic.

(3) Look up the demographics of lynching, or the fate of Black Wall Street in Tulsa. Concentrations of black economic power invariably draw strong and lethal retaliation.

(4) From the name of the decades long policy of many Southerns to resist integration by all legal means.
 
1. The old planter elite needs to be wiped out.
2. There has to be a strong black landowning middle class.
3. The social stratification among whites has to end.
4. The south needs generous investment from northern capital.

Together these will eliminate any chance of the redeemer movement having any success. The history of the south from then on would have been very different.
 
First, avoid the assassination of Lincoln.

No one can be precisely clear about how Lincoln would have conducted Reconstruction; he had not stated any general plan he intended to follow, and his views on what sort of things should happen seemed to be in flux when he was killed.

But it is certain that he would not have followed the policy of Andrew Johnson in supporting "Conservative Reconstruction" in 1865-1866.

For one thing, CR was a project of the Democratic Party in the South. With the collapse of the national Whig Party, Southern Whigs had turned to the "American" Party in 1856 and then the "Constitutional Union" Party in 1860. The CUP drew 40% of the vote in the future Confederate states, and 35% in the Deep South, so the ex-Whig vote was significant, but had no institutional substance.

The goal of CR was to entrench white supremacy in state and local government, and also control by pretty much the same crowd that had led the secession movement and the Confederacy - predominantly Democrats. This turned out to be OK with Johnson, who was a Democrat, even though it also meant exclusion of wartime Unionists. Lincoln, a Whig turned Republican, would have had a different view.

IMO, Lincoln would have started to work immediately to establish the Republican Party in the South. He would have looked among the former Whigs of the region for men to appoint to Federal offices as well as among Unionists. I think he would have proposed some Federally sponsored efforts toward physical "Reconstruction" - of railroads, bridges, roads, canals, and other infrastructure damaged in the war, with perhaps some new infrastructure that was most obviously a good idea.

These two patronage tools would enable him to recruit respectable Southerners to join the Republican Party, as well as provide an electoral program with appeal to many white Southerners. OTL, Johnson opposed such efforts to the end of his term in 1869 His successor, Grant, was utterly inexperienced in politics and made little of Federal to promote Republican Party in the South.

Where does this lead? IMHO, to Republican competion for white Southerners' allegiance almost as soon as the shooting stopped.

This would also lead Lincoln to address the other big issue - the white supremacist element of CR. Lincoln had said that he thought at least some blacks should be voters. OTL, the race issue split Southern Republicans between "Lily Whites" who echoed the Democrat position on white supremacy, which was far more popular with whites, and "Black and Tans" who favored black enfranchisement, which brought the Republicans large numbers of black votes. In the Deep South, black votes alone could win elections.

The question is whether Lincoln could find some middle ground for the Republicans. He suggested limited enfranchisement of blacks, but never got around to addressing what the limits could be, or whether they would be considered intrinsically temporary. Because anything more than a minimal token black vote meant eventual black control of many local governments and even of some states. This would be offensive to most whites' sensibilities, but not universally intolerable - if it was made very gradual, and was sweetened with the Federal patronage goodies noted above.

OTL saw a wild seesaw: Conservative Reconstruction in 1865-68, Congressionally mandated "Radical Reconstruction" in 1868-1874 (with immediate full enfrachisement of blacks), and white supremacist takeover of state governments by "Redeemers" backed by Klan terror in 1875-1877.

Could Lincoln have started a gradual process of black enfranchisement? That's what gets really hard, because it would require establishing a process that would continue for decades. Slow-boiling a frog is a lot harder when the frog knows he's being boiled, and even has some control over the fire.

So - best possible outcome? Lincoln succeeds in recruiting a lot of Southern Republicans, and also insists on an initial token black vote. This vote is solidly Republican, and useful to white Southern Republicans while not threatening to white Southerners in general. Only white candidates are allowed at first.

Over the next generation, Southern Republicans find they have an interest in expanding black voting. This would not necessarily provoke white outrage; OTL Memphis political boss E. H. Crump used black votes in the early 1900s.

Black votes for Republicans are also more acceptable because the Republicans have won more white support through patronage and public works. Thus there are more white Republican voters who appreciate black votes for their candidates.

By 1880 or so, a few token blacks have been elected to harmless offices - a few seats in state legislatures or on county commissions, and minor executive offices. (But never any position with authority over whites.)

Also (as in OTL) blacks are included in law enforcement, but only over other blacks. There are counties that are 80% and 90% black, and so in these counties, black LEOs form most of the force. By 1900, it becomes acceptable to have an occasional black head of law enforcement in these counties, with the tacit understanding that only white LEOs have authority over whites, a rule that is gradually relaxed regarding "white trash".

I see I have gone far beyond the scope of the OP's query, so I'm cutting off here.

This is an accurate and plausible theory, which meshes fairly well with the cultural realities of mid-19th Century America and the political realities created by the US Constitution. The simple fact is that the USA, both north and south, was racist. The overwhelming view among white Americans north and south of the Mason-Dixon line was that African-Americans were not actually equal to whites. No policy in the mid-late 19th century that forcefully and permanently redistributed white power and wealth to the former slaves and disenfranchised the planter class and other whites would stay popular for long in Washington because it would have required far more permanent and intrusive federal involvement in reconstruction.

People today would like to have seen a radical restructuring of the South that overturned entirely the ante-bellum power and race structure, but that would have been simply impossible in the mid-19th Century USA. Oddly, only a Confederate victory in the American Civil War followed in 10-20 years by a successful slave rebellion and revolution would do that.
 
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