It is hard to occupy a place. We lost interest in occupying Nazi Germany in a few years. In the long run, the South had to be run by Southerners.
I wold have liked to have seen a Constitutional amendment to enforce mandatory voting. Maybe people who served in Confederate legislatures or as officers could have been banned from public office. Other than that, I don’t see what much else could have been done.
Don’t wait three years to really get started in earnest.
Don’t end it in 1877 less than a decade later.
Dedicate sufficient troops to secure the black population centers against the KKK and related groups’ insurgency
Not that any of that is easy or particularly feasible given the overall political environment
This was a factor, but there was confusion and disarray in the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination. The murder of Lincoln was a shock event that had to be dealt with in its own right - that was a major distraction from dealing with the “Lost Cause”.
Bear in mind that Veeps back then were not like now, where there was more ideological alignment. Going from Abraham Lincoln to Andrew Jackson would be like going from (hypothetically speaking here) President Robert F Kennedy to…Zell Miller, and even that might not be a great analogy, admittedly.
This goes back to the original problem of white terrorism in the South from 1866 up until the election of 1876.
I would hang every officer in the Confederate military and all the politicians at the “national” and state level. I would sell all property belonging to slave owners with the proceeds going to the former slaves.
Do you think that under this plan some people just might have their fingers crossed behind their backs while taking the oath?
The last Confederate soldier died in 1951. There is no way for a 86 year occupation to work.
Here’s an idea:
First, an immediate and unconditional pardon to all enlisted men. Go back to your farms and your families immediately; your legal liability is over, and you are once again United States citizens.
Next, all officers below a certain rank are eligible for a pardon, but first they shall be arraigned on charges of treason in a court of law, so as to impress upon them the significance of their conduct. To receive the pardon, they must admit to having taken up arms against the United States and provided aid and comfort to the enemy.
All officers of a certain rank and above, and all members of the Confederate government, shall be actually tried for treason. These men are eligible to have their sentence commuted provided they admit guilt. But they will forever be guilty of treason in the eyes of the law.
As to the land, it is now conquered territory, and thus governed by the Constitution’s laws regarding territory. That is, it is within congressional control until new states are formed and admitted into the Union. All Southern states will be encouraged to reformulate and submit for re-entry, with two caveats.
All new southern state constitutions must not only re-incorporate the Civil War amendments into their state constitution (i.e. amendments 13-15), but they must also include a clause in their state constitution disavowing the recent war and its motivations (e.g. the subjugation of the Black race)
Within the heart of the Confederacy, each of the states must give up a portion of its land to form a new state, called Freedland (that name might need work), for all of the freed slaves to move to. It would be a state that guaranteed “Negro” suffrage and civil rights, and would be intended to provide a state where all of the Black people could go and live in peace. The idea would be that the white southerners can work the land in their former confederate states that once was handled by slaves.
(I thought of this idea while considering the attitudes of the time, which held that white and Black people couldn’t live harmoniously together. There had been talk of sending slaves back to Africa, but I’d like to have seen the slaves get their own land within the U.S. What I wonder, though, is how history would have played out. I can see it result in more severe segregation today. I can also easily imagine interstate violence that makes Bleeding Kansas look quaint).
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On preview, it looks like my idea of taking land to create a new state might interfere with the plan to send the enlisted men home and back to their way of life. So I’ll add in that, if your land is confiscated in the making of a new state, you should be compensated for the value of the land you’ve lost. Now git on out of here and learn to till your own plantation.
Yeah, that’s the definition of extremism. Nutty!
Right! Some of them wanted a “whites-only” USA. Not exactly multiculturalists!
I do wonder how well relocation of the former slaves would have gone. “40 acres and a mule” for them might have been good. And being a good distance away from their former owners would have kept them safe from lynchings, etc.
As many have pointed out, it’s in some ways a bizarre hypothetical, since the measures that I personally would consider optimal were in no way politically realistic at the time.
My goal would have been to break the slaveholding class and the ideology that had supported it. I would have confiscated all property owned by large-scale slaveowners and redistributed it; not only to the freed slaves, but also to poor whites, whose support would be necessary for the new regime. These people would be prohibited from voting or holding public office for life, as would all high-ranking Confederate military leaders and government officials.
Everyone else would have to convince the occupying Federal authorities of their Union loyalties before being granted voting rights. As the number of citizens eligible to vote grew and the voters demonstrated their rejection of neo-Confederate movements, political authority would very gradually be transferred from the Feds back to the State and local governments.
Both-sides-ism at its finest. Yes, most white Northerners back then were racist. No, they were not as racist as most white Southerners. The Southerners were worse.
Back to the OP: I must reluctantly admit that, prior to the Civil War, slavery was legal. But just because you’re allowed to own another person, doesn’t mean that you actually do. Every former slaveowner would be required to provide documentation of a chain of ownership for every one of their former slaves, tracing back to the original owner. Any who couldn’t do so (which, realistically, would be all of them) would be found to be in possession of stolen property, and would be required to pay to the original owner a sum equal to the fair market value of the labor derived from that slave. If necessary, lands would be confiscated and sold to pay for this sum.
This is very similar to what actually happened.
All persons above the rank of colonel in the Confederate army and all politicians had to swear to the following oath to be pardoned “I, _____, do solemnly swear or affirm, in presence of Almighty God, that I will henceforth faithfully support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Union of the States thereunder. And that I will, in like manner, abide by and faithfully support all laws and proclamations which have been made during the existing rebellion with reference to the emancipation of slaves, so help me God.”
If we’re ignoring political or other practicalities, the answer seems obvious. Land reform, full enfranchisement, no Black Codes, and enough guns to crush white terrorism.
But even operating within the constraints of the time, it’s not unreasonable to think you could have carried out the 40 acres and a mule promise and spent more federal blood and treasure crushing the KKK and like-minded terrorists. Might not have worked out perfectly, but would have been a lot better.
Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, back in the 1960s, wanted something like that, a separate nation-state for Black Americans to be carved out of the United States.
Their was thought back then of making Kansas a black state. In fact they did set up some towns that were founded by ex slaves in many states.