re: #369 Decatur Deb

How much better would they have fared as the very visible wards of a multi-generation military occupation? We’re wandering in alternate history.

(Zeitgeisting and all, but I don’t think even they would have sought the fair/just definition that Marshal Reeves proposed above in 359.)

IMHO, the fabled forty acres and a mule for each freed slave, with some reasonable Federal influence against white southerners’ robbing back this land in some way, would have allowed the freedmen to fare reasonably well. Especially if the national government had actually protected their constitutional rights as citizens, in particular the right to vote.

It’s only alternative history because the racist power game made it so.