re: #376 Decatur Deb

Unless the Union Army was able to quarter troops in every burg, the freedmen would have been scapegoated in every place they weren’t an armed majority. Here, a re-enfranchised white power structure called “The Bourbons” tried a number of measures to re-enslave the minority before evolving sharecropping. (The Bourbons fought against the early Klan whose exclusionist goals would have deprived them of skilled labor.) Reconstruction was lifted too soon, but it was never going to be a long-term answer if it relied on Federal troops and LE. Whatever was dealt out to the “treasonous” rebels was definitely going to fall on the ex-slaves as soon as the occupation was lifted. And that happened rapidly and harshly enough without revenge policies.

um… the Civil Rights Act of 1875, as enforced militarily by President Grant, if they’d had another couple of years….