re: #375 whitebeach

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.

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.