When WWII ended, we found all sorts of evidence for the Holocaust-as did the surviving German peoples. A good chunk of the German populace then forswore that anything like that would ever happen again-and the antisemites and Neo-Nazis were immediately reduced to a small fringe with very little political power.
But when slavery was ended in the wake of the Civil War, no such reckoning seemed to take place, no deep shaming of unstated and insidious racist beliefs.
Did we really need something as pernicious as the Holocaust to fully grab people’s attention and force them to be truly contrite? To become fully aware of said racist currents in their society (even if they themselves did not hold said beliefs)?
What would have needed to have taken place for the US to have undergone the racist purge like Germany did? Did Lincoln’s premature death end up obviating said opportunity?
One factor may be that the Civil War was a civil war, whereas the post-war WWII Germany was occupied by foreign countries. Americans were probably loathe to impose terms such as those imposed on Germany by the conquering Allies.
Also, Germany had conquered France, large swaths of Europe, etc. Unlike the South which never seriously threatened Northern territory. If the Confederacy had driven as far north as New York and Vermont before being pushed back south, then it might be different.
Another is that the view of Northerners towards black people was hardly good, either. In fact wasn’t there slavery in the North as well? Now I understand that there was plenty of anti-Semitism by the Allies, too, but they didn’t Holocaust Jews. Anyway, that to say - the north probably just didn’t have it in it to impose an anti-slavery, anti-racism shaming campaign. The impetus just wasn’t there.
Lincoln himself was the one that set the stage for it. His goal was to preserve the Union in the most pragmatic way possible. Once the Confederate Army was defeated, the strategy was to rebuild the Union, not punish anyone any more than necessary. Reconstruction was brutal enough on its own because some of it depended on occupation.
Who would you select to punish anyway? Robert E Lee? He was very well respected even in the North. Jefferson Davis? Maybe but he was just an elected President of an area that considered itself a sovereign nation and he is just one person. Slave-owners? That wouldn’t work either because slavery existed in some Union states even during the Civil War as well. Individual soldiers? That is a horrible idea because most of them were just draftees that were forced to defend their homeland under unimaginable conditions even for the time.
In my opinion, the strategy that was used was the most sound one although Reconstruction could have been handled better. If you want to reunify a nation, the last thing you want to do is to retake regions in rebellion by force and then punish them even further after their military has lost. That would simply fuel even more rebellion.
As always, I have to point out that the Civil War wasn’t a humanitarian relief effort from the North’s point of view. They simply wanted to keep the Union intact no matter what it took whether the slaves in the states where it was still legal were freed or not. Abraham Lincoln himself made that very clear.
Japan was treated much the same way even though they were much worse than even Germany in some respects during WWII. We firebombed the hell out of them and then nuked them twice. After the unpleasantness was over, rebuilt the country so that they are one of the top economies in the world now and they are a strong U.S. ally now.
Slaves were not in death camps. They lived miserable lives, and if I had to choose the life of a slave or the life of a Jew in Lodz born c. 1920, I’d choose Lodz. I’d probably have a better chance of surviving a year of slavery than a year of the Final Solution period, whether I managed to find a place to hide initially, or ended up in a camp almost right away, but I’d have memories of a decent life for a few years, I’d probably be literate, and my early memories would give me hope that if I could weather the war, there would be light at the end of the tunnel. Life in slavery was a long string of nothing but misery.
Nonetheless, the life expectancy of a slave in 1850 was probably longer than the life expectancy of a young Jew in Central or Eastern Europe in 1940, and then there were the movies of the liberation of the camps.
The sight of all the walking skeletons, and the bodies being bulldozed into mass graves was shocking. It set what Germany had done apart from other atrocities in history, because those films and pictures were in newsreels and in magazines.
They spawned the Nuremberg Trials, and were further publicized by being shown there.
People could read books that were narratives of lives of slavery, and in fact, some of those did move many people to become activists for abolitionism, but no white person looked as a former slave and thought “There but for the grace of G-d…” I think people who saw pictures of survivors of the Holocaust thought that.
The two events are difficult to compare. Apples and oranges, really.
I’m not saying slave owners shouldn’t have done something, or had something done to them-- I think the “40 acres and a mule” would have been a good start, if the land and the mules had been there, but I think they weren’t really available. But I don’t think that something should have been done to former slave owner simply because something was done to former Nazis.
I think the culture of authoritarianism, fascism and disrespect for human rights is much more ingrained in the US south than it ever was in Germany. Large percentages of the public in Germany voted for communists, social democrats, etc.
In 1932, the communists and social democrats earned a bigger combined % of the vote than the nazis.
However adding in the DNVP with the nazis gave conservatives a majority, but the point is that communists & social democrats earned 37% of the vote.
So I don’t think German culture is like white culture in the south. German culture was always more liberal and divided. I get the impression white culture in the south is more uniform. Then again, the south was solidly behind FDR.
On top of that, the federal government abandoned reconstruction in the 1870s.
Northerners were mostly just as racist as Southerners. For some, opposition to slavery was itself born out of a racist impulse to reserve the “new” lands of the West for white settlers.
SOME abolitionists wanted to treat those who had been in power in the South in a very vindictive way. If that viewpoint had been allowed to carry the day, then treason trials, executions, etc. would have ruled the South for several years post-war. But the majority of politicians in the North did not view the Southern elite as being morally evil by advocating and using slavery. They simply considered it an institution that had outlived its time. Remember: the war didn’t start as an attempt to force the South to give up its slaves immediately, as would have been the case had there been a moral crusade against slavery as an “evil,” along the lines of the Holocaust.
As has been mentioned, a key goal of the U.S. after winning the Civil War was to reintegrate southern states into the Union. Nuremberg-style trials and executions (which a few firebrands would’ve welcomed) would have greatly impeded that goal.*
A good-sized chunk of the South was occupied (as Germany was) so I’m not sure how dramatically different the “day of reckoning” was for the general citizenry.
*not to mention that mass murders and other atrocities committed by Germans were exponentially worse than anything done by Southern forces in the Civil War, incidents like the Fort Pillow massacre not withstanding.
As noted already, pretty much the entire US (north and south) was “racist”. Lincoln, himself, did not view blacks as equal to whites. Blacks mostly weren’t slaves in the north, but they weren’t full citizens either. Let’s remember that “Separate but Equal” was a ruling allowed by the SCOTUS, which was not some bastion of Southern Racism. * Franklin Roosevelt* did not have the will to integrate the military* 80 years after the end of slavery.*
Also, remember that slavery was explicitly allowed by the constitution. The crime that the South committed was rebellion, not slavery. When Lincoln issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation, that only freed the slaves in the occupied south. There were still border states within the union even that had legal slavery after that.
I think a primary reason was, Grant promised amnesty for all Confederate soldiers to Lee when Lee signed his surrender at Appamattox Courthouse, and then Grant pretty much strongarmed President Johnson into doing it - and eventually the amnesty applied to CSA officeholders, including Jefferson Davis. They wanted Reconstruction to work, but part of the deal that let Rutherford Hayes become president even though it was clear that Samuel Tilden won the election was that Reconstruction would end.
Secessionism and advocacy for slavery were immediately reduced to a small fringe with very little political power.
Unfortunately, white supremacy, and a national myth of black people as inferiors, permeated the entire country (and still does, to a large extent). So, the Union was hardly in a position to eradicate racism.
Perhaps an invading force from outside the US could have eventually done the job, but not Americans.
The Radical Republicans (the guys who impeached Johnson) didn’t get their way, that’s mainly it. A large contingent of Lincoln’s party wanted to “Nuremburg” the South, and more. They were influential, but the moderates and Democrats won the day.
Yeah, the KKK had its terrorist activities and the Federal Government left and went home and the South slid back into Jim Crow and no representation for blacks and so on. The North won the war, the South won Reconstruction. Not enough people/politicians cared enough to make societal change happen/stick. Or even to make voting rights stick.
Yep. The whole country was racist, and horribly so, by modern standards. The Civil War from the Federal point of view wasn’t even a crusade to end slavery; it was a war to keep the Union together and rein in the rebellious states. In essence, the South was fighting to preserve slavery, and the North was fighting to preserve the Union.
Afterward, there was enough racist feeling for Plessy v. Ferguson (Separate but Equal) to be decided some 31 years after the end of the war. I can’t help but think that if there was not significant racist leanings throughout the country, that the Supreme Court would have decided the way they did.