Can O'Worms: Reconstruction - good idea or not?

[Taverner]

[Quantess]

1. reconstruction of what?

[LSK]

3. thats what I am wondering

:shrug:

[Adsos Letter]

4. Reconstruction was an attempt...

following the Civil War to "reconstruct" the south...the region was divided into (7, I think) military districts overseen by a military governor, and occupied by federal troops.

[Quantess]

5. Thanks.

IMHO, when a topic goes back a couple of centuries, there needs to be some context in the wording. Readers will naturally try to think of contemporary situations. I was wondering "recontruction of the lower ninth ward?" Dense readers will appreciate the background information.

[Adsos Letter]

2. I had to go with "Those carpetbaggers ate my dog!"

...'cause it gave me a good laugh. As for Reconstruction? Hard to say...seems like the old South just replaced slavery with Jim Crow and exploitative sharecropping (although the destruction of chattel slavery was certainly a good thing)...not sure the carpetbaggers left much of a good impression either.

[depakid]

7. Jim Crow came some years after reconstruction

though the stage was set when Rutherford Hayes weaseled the election of 1876 away from Samuel Tilden.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1876

Like many grand policies in American history, reconstruction had some noble goals but was fraught with corruption- and created animosity that lasted over a century.

This is pretty fair summary of what happened:

To consolidate its victory over the former Southern slave owners the North secured passage of the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, and the 14th and 15th Amendments guaranteeing blacks citizenship and the right to vote. Republican dominated Reconstruction governments in the South enacted basic reforms such as the establishment of public schools, hospitals and orphan asylums. Women won the right to own property and divorce laws were liberalized.

In the South the former slave owning class resisted reform and attempted to reassert its political domination. Organized in the Democratic Party the ex-slave owners recaptured power in one Southern state after another. Violence was endemic in many areas of the South, spearheaded by the Ku Klux Klan, the terrorist wing of the Southern elite.

Having secured its economic interests, as time went on the Northern bourgeoisie showed less and less enthusiasm for the egalitarian aims of Reconstruction in the South, including the protection of the democratic rights of the newly freed slaves.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/dec2000/1876-d21.shtml

[terrell9584]

8. The reason that Jim Crow happened

Is because when the Redeemers took power, the first thing they did was to blame everything that had happened on Reconstruction officials. This was actually accurate as they were corrupt and saw the region as some kind of piggybank, they took all they could.

However, the subtext was that Reconstruction officials based all of their electoral support on Freedmen. When the Redeemers took back control, they did it by running campaigns totally based on race, and by telling white voters that the cause of everything wrong in their lives was the responsibility of the Freedman voter.

It was the casting of blame away from the antebellum system and from any culpability that Confederate officials may have had in either bringing on the war, or the conduct within the war (including blowing several chances to win it)

In the 1880s, agrarian movements began to rise, bringing many poor white voters who had just voted for the redeemer Bourbons out of race to once again oppose them. Populists began to operate with the Democratic Party, which at this point was dominant even though there was still a two party system in place.

The Bourbon response was to get black voters to vote for them. It's not known how they did it, but in the majority of Southern states, by the late 1880s, Bourbon electoral strength was based on polling large margins in heavily black areas (often accomplished via voter fraud, admittedly)

For this reason, in many states, Populism suddenly took on the issue of black disenfrachisement, as populist leaders such as Ben Tillman, Jeff Davis, Vardaman, etc all told their various constituencies that the majority of white people were with them, but that they couldn't win because the Bourbons would just drum up enough black votes (never mind it was voter fraud) to beat them. It's why black disenfranchisement was often a first goal for populist administrations once in power (best evidenced by Davis in Arkansas and Tillman in South Carolina)

However, the other component in many states was that wealthier whites, seeing the political danger of having all whites voting, as poverty kept increasing, began pushing to make all disenfranchisement measures in theory race neutral. In that blacks would be disenfrachised, but they would also disenfrachise poorer whites as well, the idea being that if they didn't vote, pesky Populists couldn't win Democratic primaries, and they diverted the issue among the rural poor to religious differences and prohibition.

At this they were successful too, and just as blacks were kept off the voter rolls, a fair number of "undesirable" whites also found themselves removed from the ballot, usually through inability to pay poll tax.

[terrell9584]

6. Lincoln's plan was a good one

Johnson wanted to follow it. He paid a heavy price for that. The radicals were hell bent on making a statement, what kind of statement has yet to be known. Johnson's plan (which Tennessee was readmitted under) was the same plan Lincoln had, with charity towards all and malice towards none.

Problem with that was, Thaddeus Stevens was slightly insane and it showed. Reconstruction also provided a chance for adventurers to move South with the express intent of looting the place. There was no concern among Reconstruction officials for anyone in the South. They didn't care about the ex-Confederates, they didn't care about the Freedmen, and they didn't care about what native Unionists there had been in the South. What they cared about was power and money. In Alabama, one of the Reconstruction Republican U.S. Senators actually set it up for the Democrats to take back the legislature so that his fellow Republican U.S. Senator could be replaced with a Democrat (so that he could have more of an influence on Republican patronage), and then for the Republicans to take back the legislature in 1872 so that he could win re-election to the U.S. Senate. His name was Spencer.

There was the little fact that there was urban warfare to decide a gubernatorial race in Arkansas (this was either 1872 or 1874), as in the camps of the two factions actually took up arms and proceeded to have skirmishes out in the streets of Little Rock.

The aftermath of Reconstruction was that virtually every Southern major city government, including New Orleans, the largest city at the time, ended up declaring bankruptcy in either the 1870's or 1880's. Several state governments did as well.

The legacy of Reconstruction is that Reconstruction officials divided the population by race (never a good idea), used the government for their own enrichment and when the fire got too hot to handle with local resistance movements, they bailed out, and the region and the country paid a high price for it. It is largely because of the way that they entirely mishandled what could have been a golden oppurtunity to move everything forward that we ended up with the growing cycle of poverty, whereby each generation of Southerners prior to World War II was somehow more impoverished than the last. Sharecropping peaked in the early 1940's, the only thing that killed it was World War II and the industrialization it provided because it was WWII that brought many people off of the tenant farms and into the urban areas.

Without the invervention of WWII, the trend would have been for a majority of Southern residents to have been farm tenants by the early 1950s

(Incidentally, I think that the current attempt at nation building in Iraq has many similarities to Radical Reconstruction in the South, for what it's worth)

[Taverner]

10. Heavy price indeed - he was the only other President impeached

[trof]

9. Got-durned scalawags and carpetbaggers.

A scalawag was a Southern white who joined the Republican party in the ex-Confederate South during Reconstruction.

The term carpetbaggers was used to describe white northern Republicans who came South following the war and who had allegedly arrived with all of their worldly possessions stuffed into a carpetbag, ready to loot and plunder the defeated South.

And they like to have rernt us.
I ain't sayin' one ate my dog, but 2 cows and a mule went missin'.
;-)