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> This kind of thing used to be seen as an important part of peacefully reabsorbing and reconciling the South with the rest of the nation. It strikes me as incr

> This kind of thing used to be seen as an important part of peacefully reabsorbing and reconciling the South with the rest of the nation. It strikes me as incredibly foolish to renege on this deal today .... Except the South reneged on the deal almost as soon as the war ended, violently suppressing and oppressing the formerly-enslaved.

0815test 7y ago
The Reconstruction was badly bungled on both sides. Many Southerners even today object far more to what happened to the South "as soon as the war ended"[1], than to the war itself. This is not a justification of Jim Crow and the like of course, but an account of how the folks in the South who wished to "violently suppress and oppress the formerly-enslaved" for their own benefit managed to get away with it, despite having just lost a war with the North over that very issue. [1] Well, not quite; the "Radical Reconstruction" was a bit of a later development. But then, the truly nasty politics on the other side, with a "Redeemer" movement working together with violent, paramilitary organizations (including the 1st 'Klan') to ensure that white Southern democrats would dominate the South and impose overt white supremacy, was itself enabled and triggered by a backlash to the Radical Reconstruction.