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this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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"I...am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done."
Yet our record bloodshed in the Civil War soon to come still wouldn't be enough to completely remove it all. Sure slavery was abolished, but things were still horrible for so many reasons for the following 100 years, and somewhat still are today.
I blame Reconstruction ending too soon, honestly.
That's what happens when you kill it's driving force and replace him with a sympathizer.
Let's not pretend that Lincoln being there would have magically resolved it all. Let's also not pretend he'd have cared to implement it to the level anyone might think.
We mythologize him, but he was ultimately a politician making calculated decisions for his career. That's why he wasted effort seeking more electoral votes by getting Nevada made into a state. That's why he chose Johnson to ensure he'd have some favorability with the south.
He did the right thing because it was politically convenient.
Lincoln wouldn't have magically resolved everything, as Lincoln was still from the moderate wing of the Republican Party (even if he became more radical as the war wore on), but it's hard to imagine a worse successor than Andrew Johnson, who wasn't even part of the big tent antislavery party. Traitorous fuck, no better than the copperheads.
It's pretty much a light switch though. Lincoln put this program in place and Johnson turned it off as soon as he could. Lincoln may not have won the peace but he would have at least tried.
i blame reconstruction in the first place, it was co-opted by the people who made this shit an issue in the first place
It was only abolished for the unincarcerated.
Even then, it was only legally abolished, some plantations never had any Union soldiers come, so they never freed their slaves, just kept them in "sharecropping" agreements but they weren't allowed to leave. Actual share cropping was also horrific and also sometimes had slavelike conditions.
Some of these fake "sharecropping" agreements stayed in place till the mid 1900s.
Here's a very excellent video by Knowing Better on Neoslavery.