(10-13-2022, 11:17 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:(10-13-2022, 07:59 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: For the Freedmen, Reconstruction was supposed to be a 1T. Southern blacks took on Civic characteristics in attempts to establish effective institutions. Southern whites sought to return as much as possible to the norms of the antebellum era in what looks like an effort to revive a 3T. That of course was a nasty conflict.
I get the sense that 1Ts in general have a tendency to pretend more problems have been solved than was actually the case. This makes young idealists look around like "uh...am I crazy or something? Does no one else see this?".
For Southern whites the American Civil War was a nearly unmitigated disaster. For many, personal recovery from a catastrophe often involves reconstructing or recreating things as much as possible as they had been before the disaster. This is a predictable course of behavior for many. So your successful store burns down. What do you do? You start over if you can.. well, not quite from scratch because you might have insurance claims to collect and you have loyal customers. Your suppliers will want to do business with you again. (Much of the insurance was on merchandise bought outright or put on consignment). If you are young enough, you will not go back to the farm or return to factory work.
Being a soldier in the Confederate Army wasn't so great. The pay was poor, and at a certain time you were likely to become a POW. Confederate debt was worthless. If one was a slave-owner, then a huge asset was wiped off your books. If you dealt in slaves as a business, you owned Confederate currency or bonds, had collateral as Confederate assets, or had assets denominated in Confederate currency had been wiped out -- and whatever two-legged inventory you owned before it was emancipated was wiped off your books as a financial asset.
At least the Yankees didn't take land away from the planter class or small farmers, but postwar state and local governments needed tax revenue and needed it fast. Before the Civil War, slaves were property to tax; after the Civil War, such people were no longer property. That meant big increases in taxes upon just about any other asset, and in a rural area that meant farmland. Much of the Southern white resentment against Reconstruction was a form of tax revolt.
Freed slaves in place were emancipated without assets and were obliged, for lack of other means, to submit to the terms that planters offered, often as sharecroppers or low-paid farm laborers. Pay might have been little more than room and board. Even so, those former slaves typically availed themselves of something that had been denied: the precious gift of literacy. Slaves may have been unlettered, but they weren't stupid. Recognizing that ignorance is not bliss, many freedmen in place became excessively educated for being serf-like subjects of their former owners. (Note well that the perfect level of education for a despotic or totalitarian order is bare literacy. People who can read between the lines are less suited for domination than those who can just barely read and write).
The ex-slaves who may have done best were those who took Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation seriously and escaped to the Union lines. They were free, but they were also a highly-desirable source of labor for such work as the building or rebuilding of fortifications. Paid somewhat fairly they could accumulate savings. Some even joined the Union Army. They got paid in Union currency which would not be devalued after the war. Such was precious for starting businesses or buying the assets that tradesmen needed. Many of these became the elected officials of the postwar South.
Freedmen established institutions from political machines (natural for them as it was for white people Up North), social organizations, businesses, churches independent of "white" oversight, and even colleges). Many historically-black colleges and universities (HBCU) date from this time. Is this surprising? The Puritans established Harvard College in 1636 and were delayed only in having an adequate population. This may not have been quite paradise for blacks, but considering what happened after the reactionary restoration of White Power with the aid of hooded proto-fascists, this was a halcyon time of great promises for black people in the South. It is easy to see what sort of world Freedmen would have established had it not been for white racists destroying many of the commercial and institutional achievements of the Freedmen and taking away such freedom as they had.
Political and economic life was a delicate balance at best before the end of Reconstruction, but after 1877 the condition of most blacks went to subjection by the agrarian elite. African-American businesses typically went bust, and bank deposits disintegrated. Southern whites long had a distrust of commerce, banking, and industry because people in those activities typically did better than small farmers. Add to this, they were competition for the super-cheap labor necessary for Junker-like estates of the sort that survived the war and Reconstruction.
White southerners long resisted industrialization at the expense of grinding poverty in what would now be seen as economic underdevelopment characteristic of much of the Third World by post-colonial standards in non-industrial countries. It is telling that huge numbers of the descendants of Freedmen went Up North to where the industry was (well, so did many "Mountain South" whites who also got the economic and political shaft from the agrarian elites of the South) and where there was opportunity to escape the grinding poverty that they knew all too well. White southerners often wallowed in nostalgia over the Good Old Days as they understood them long after the end of the Civil War to the extent of reviving the Confederate heritage about fifty years later. This included the naïfs who started erected monuments to Confederate political and military leaders but also those who established the dangerous, fascist Second (1915) Klan. Well, this vile group came into existence before Mussolini established his totalitarian clique and before Adolf "Antichrist" Hitler got some bickering right-wingers and pseudo-socialist cranks to accept his idea of "National Socialism". The Klan already had the gaudy symbolism, the racism, the night rallies, the fraudulent recollection of history, the Jew-hating, and the hostility to organized labor characteristic of European Nazis and fascists. Consider the source. The Second Klan would achieve great influence even outside the South as the biggest mass movement in America before MAGA.
Up North after the Civil War, Americans quickly went 1T as a rule. That also created a huge regional divide.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.