Which would have been better for African-Americans during the Civil War?

Which would have been better for African-Americans during the Civil War?

  • Quick Civil War

    Votes: 6 12.8%
  • Long drawn out conflict

    Votes: 41 87.2%

  • Total voters
    47
A quick and largely painless Civil War where the Union curb-stomps the South in a few months, or a long drawn-out conflict that lasts longer than IOTL and causes much more damage?
 
I've been kicking around a scenario for the last few weeks where France kicks Mexico's teeth in pretty early and then aids the South in becoming a running sore for America even after they are formally defeated, this continues all the way up until a major conflict explodes a couple of decades later with France and Maximillian's Mexico on one side and America and Germany on the other, when the running sore becomes a full-fledged insurgency. The reason I think this would be better for the freedmen is because then instead of the Northerners getting weary of occupation and losing the peace, they would always have an incentive to stay and finish the job as the rebels wpuld be identified with a foreign power trying to tear America apart.
 
Given that the Emancipation Proclamation was not issued until late 1862, it would have to be the latter option. A quick Union victory presumably would have preserved the status quo and a Confederate victory obviously isn't good for them.
 
If war is pretty short, slavery probably last much longer. Lincoln was ready preserve that if it is cost of unify of the nation. He gave emancipation proclamation on 1862. If war ends before that, emancipation hardly happen.

Altough another thing is how blacks are treated after ACW which is longer than in OTL. Confederacy victory clearly is not good thing for them.
 
The Civil War if longer would have likely seen more rights extended to black people in the Union and bizarrely probably in the CSA. The Union is still the side to root for, but the CSA would have had to give more rights to slaves, if only to keep the war effort going. Comparisons to the evolving position of women during the First & Second World Wars are appropriate. If the war went on for long enough, I would not say it is out of the realm of possibility, to butterfly the Jim Crow laws.
 

Gaius Julius Magnus

Gone Fishin'
From the perspective of a slave, a longer war as originally most in the North hoped the conclusion of the conflict would see a status quo antebellum. The longer it went and the more the casualty rates piled up, the desire for a much harsher and transformative peace arose. Especially as thousands of slaves were traveling with the Union armies as contraband.
 
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Given that the Emancipation Proclamation was not issued until late 1862, it would have to be the latter option. A quick Union victory presumably would have preserved the status quo and a Confederate victory obviously isn't good for them.

This is why I call it 'American style slavery' rather than 'Southern style slavery'. There was a status quo there that was broken. Looking at it from the other status quo, a few status quo's down by now, can make it seem like all the bad stuff congealed in the South and was lanced by Grant.
 

missouribob

Banned
The longer the war the better things are for blacks. The South in OTL was on the edge of using black soldiers in mass. By 1864 in OTL you had folks like General Sherman enacting total war on the south. And of course in OTL you had a crap ton of violence during reconstruction to include the assassination of the President of the United States.

Now let's say you can somehow get the war to drag into 1866/7. By 67 you should have blacks fighting in large numbers on both sides, maybe a terrorist campaign by southerners during the war in which Lincoln and the Vice President is killed leaving a Radical Republican of some stripe as President and calls to hang the Southern elites. Basically for Reconstruction to work for blacks in the 1860s Northern whites need to hate Southern ones with a passion. They need to want to screw them over instead of having reconciliation. A longer, nastier war will set more things in place for that type of outcome.
 
Basically for Reconstruction to work for blacks in the 1860s Northern whites need to hate Southern ones with a passion. They need to want to screw them over instead of having reconciliation. A longer, nastier war will set more things in place for that type of outcome.

The fundamental problem with Reconstruction was that most Northerners were racist themselves and really didn't care much for the rights of black people, once they had been given freedom from slavery. They had little enthusiasm for a long military occupation of the South to enforce the rights of people they deemed inferior. I don't think that can easily be changed just by making the war longer.
 

missouribob

Banned
The fundamental problem with Reconstruction was that most Northerners were racist themselves and really didn't care much for the rights of black people, once they had been given freedom from slavery. They had little enthusiasm for a long military occupation of the South to enforce the rights of people they deemed inferior. I don't think that can easily be changed just by making the war longer.
Assassinate enough northern politicians to make the Radical Republicans more radical and you can probably get state death theory accepted in Washington. Get that accepted and the Republicans will start craving Republican strongholds out of the South. Get that to happen and Black Americans will get a state in the Mississippi River Delta with like a 90 percent black population, far too black for the redeemers to well redeem. Americans were far to racist for black and white to live in peace and harmony back then. The best case scenario for Black Americans was to get a state. To get a least one place that didn't have Jim Crow.
 

B-29_Bomber

Banned
A war that lasts until 1863 with a much more nuanced solution to the slavery issue.

1) You avoid the wholesale wreaking of the South, avoiding disenfranchising the poor southern white.
2) Perhaps with compensated emancipation you'll avoid destroying the Southern economy.

In the end in order to sell emancipation they need to wage class warfare by pitting the poor southern white against the rich aristocracy.

Having a foreign enemy could help as well.
 
The best possible outcome, IMHO, would be to have a war that concludes slightly earlier than OTL, long enough to butterfly away the Lincoln Assassination but short enough to keep the issues that faced the Union at the end of the war more or less similar. You can see a sort of "Jacobin phase" of Reconstruction in the waning days of the war, before Johnson had the opportunity to reverse a lot of the moves they made. I'm reminded in particular of an incident in the Sea Isles in South Carolina, where freed slaves had been promised the land they had previously worked by the Lincoln Administration, only for that to be reversed by the Johnson Administration in order to act conciliatory toward the southern aristocracy.

The assumption that Northern policymakers run the spectrum from ambivalent to openly racist toward african-americans in the south isn't wrong and shouldn't be ignored, but if you can maintain the power of the Lincoln-Stevens-Radical Republican branch of government, you could see a sort of "alliance" between the Union and emancipated slaves to prevent militant revanchism in the South.

Is it the best outcome for all people involved? Probably not - this would likely lead to prolonged guerrilla warfare against the Union, and punish those who weren't necessarily involved in the worst of slavery, and create even more lasting resentment between the South and North, but you have a built-in economic base for African-Americans, and you put them in an economically advantageous position. That's the best outcome for African-Americans.
 

Red Orm

Banned
If the war is too long though, couldn't everybody get so tired of fighting that they agree to status quo ante bellum? There is a point where exhaustion overrides recuperation of losses.
 
Given that the Emancipation Proclamation was not issued until late 1862, it would have to be the latter option. A quick Union victory presumably would have preserved the status quo and a Confederate victory obviously isn't good for them.

It's entirely possible that, if the conflict is too quick, slavery doesn't even get abolished.

Unlikely. The whole reason the South broke away was because the Lincoln administration would have been the final nail in the coffin of slavery. Having the union curb-stomp the rebels early on would probably go a long way to convincing people that resistance is futile.
 
If the war is too long though, couldn't everybody get so tired of fighting that they agree to status quo ante bellum? There is a point where exhaustion overrides recuperation of losses.

Well, they can't really restore slavery...

Unlikely. The whole reason the South broke away was because the Lincoln administration would have been the final nail in the coffin of slavery. Having the union curb-stomp the rebels early on would probably go a long way to convincing people that resistance is futile.

Lincoln did not campaign on an abolitionist platform. He was opposed to the extension of slavery into the new western territories but did not have plans to end it where it already existed. The war pushed him to the point of abolitionism.
 
To be ghoulish if the South had kept fighting for just a few more months you'd have that many fewer recruits for the KKK et al.
 
The fact that the war was dragging on allowed Lincoln and Republicans to justify attacking slavery as a wartime measure, and they weren't wrong. Slaves were widely used by the South in several military applications, especially as teamsters and laborers. They were also used in several industrial applications such as coal and iron mining that were useful for the war effort. Going after slavery was also seen as a way to punish the South, and a vengeful populace in the middle of a long bloody war very much wanted that.
 
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