Reply #6: Lincoln's plan was a good one [View All]

[terrell9584]

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)