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.

As always I respect what you say, but I know the history of all this pretty well myself. I think it’s pretty clear that if the North had, in the early postwar years, enforced a policy of reparations and actual equality for freed slaves, and also for free blacks from before the war, a great deal of what you suggest, which of course did happen, could have been prevented. It wouldn’t have required troops in every hamlet, but simply punishment for some of the more egregious offenses against law and justice. I could name off the top of my head three large-scale massacres of blacks and white sympathizers in Louisiana alone before the end of Reconstruction that, if the offenders had been convicted of their crimes, might have made a large difference in ensuing history.