I think the extent of reconstruction was always going to be limited by the total macroeconomic incompetence of the Republicans (which tbf they shared with all elites back then) the key was how much you get done in the first couple years before the regime falls apart, and Johnson fucked it - ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

michaelcaley.bsky.social • 31 days ago

I think the extent of reconstruction was always going to be limited by the total macroeconomic incompetence of the Republicans (which tbf they shared with all elites back then)

the key was how much you get done in the first couple years before the regime falls apart, and Johnson fucked it

Comments

skipjack.bsky.social•31 days ago

I think an even more fundamental challenge was there just wasn’t the political will for a the kind of military occupation required

michaelcaley.bsky.social•31 days ago

there was for a few years. You had a few years

rev-avocado.bsky.social•31 days ago

The thing that needs to happen is (1) land reform and (2) the redrawing of state boundaries to create freedmen states. Those two policies create a durable institutional and political-economic bulwark when the backlash comes.

thoreauaway.bsky.social•30 days ago

MS and SC were already majority freedman, and LA was majority black (although not quite majority freedman - free people of color held the balance antebellum). How many majority freedman states would you have created?

michaelcaley.bsky.social•31 days ago

land reform would have happened if Johnson had just been an incompetent drunk instead of an active racist. The army was all ready to do it. That's the one that kills me

rev-avocado.bsky.social•31 days ago

There will still be backlash, but it would be much easier to impose racial equality on the south with a half-dozen Senators from the 80%+ black states of Madison, Adams, and Lincoln.

charltoncussans.bsky.social•30 days ago

You should read this:

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/until-every-drop-of-blood-is-paid-a-more-radical-american-civil-war.451420/

ordinalandsman.bsky.social•31 days ago

'Northern Republicans had disastrous economic policy beliefs that sunk reconstruction' was definitely how I read the history of the antebellum period the first time, but it's hard to see how the U.S. becomes an economic giant without the wildly unpopular economic transformations of this period.

michaelcaley.bsky.social•31 days ago

yeah I think the question is whether there was a path to the (more or less inevitable) spread of American capitalism that doesn't include the sharecropping / Jim Crow regime that puts the slave power back in charge of the southern economy and politics

and I think land reform had a shot

johnlk.bsky.social•31 days ago

There was never anywhere close to a majority even of northern Republicans for land reform, and if Johnson couldn't manufacture one by being a tremendous asshole for nearly four years, it's hard to see how you can get to one.

michaelcaley.bsky.social•31 days ago

land reform would have just *happened* through the actions of the occupying armies if Johnson hadn't stopped it

johnlk.bsky.social•31 days ago

There might have been some limited land reform in places like the Sea Islands, but most of Congress didn't want it. We can see what happened in Tennessee and Louisiana under Lincoln!

rev-avocado.bsky.social•31 days ago

I think it's entirely possible, the politics of the south will just resemble the politics of the agricultural west to a much greater degree, rather than have their own quasi-feudal stratocratic feel.

ordinalandsman.bsky.social•31 days ago

IMO 'was American capitalist domination of the global economy inevitable' is the big question here. Lots of reasons to believe that it was but also lots of countries that looked to be on the same trajectory as the U.S. (Chile, Argentina, to a lesser extent Mexico and Brazil) that stagnated.

michaelcaley.bsky.social•31 days ago

yeah

I am doubtful that the slave power recapturing the south was a core part of making that happen

the American institutions that cultivated our capitalism were mostly northern

but where the offramps are -- surely they exist? -- is an interesting questions

ordinalandsman.bsky.social•31 days ago

Oh I'm not arguing that Jim Crow was ineveitable, but there's a vulgar leftist belief (that I am extremely sympathetic to) that the failure to kill Jim Crow was a symptom of some broader macro-economic failure to deliver prosperity that I think is unfortunately wrong.

michaelcaley.bsky.social•31 days ago

yeah I mean

davidjorgonson.bsky.social•31 days ago

The Republican Party's free labor ideology said that slavery was the only problem. The free market will provide once slavery is abolished. Herbert Hoover stuff.

ordinalandsman.bsky.social•30 days ago

I mean, the orthodox marxist historian take on this stuff is that Hooverism was too late but basically the correct state ideology for an earlier period of capitalist victory over feudalism.

davidjorgonson.bsky.social•30 days ago

Every other industrializing country of the 1800s greatly increased state capacity to deal with the challenges of industrialization. The USA is an exception, and not in a effective way

ordinalandsman.bsky.social•30 days ago

What we now call accelerationism is going even further and saying that Hoover should have won because he could have pushed the contradictions of capitalism farther into socialist revolution territory rather than the New Deal settlement.

ordinalandsman.bsky.social•31 days ago

Like the populist frustration was that smallholder farmers were being forced of their land and into dangerous urban factories which was a completely valid complaint and also objectively the optimal path forward for the U.S. economy without which a bunch of things probably happen much more slowly.