User talk:CorruptUser/Sandbox

Reconstruction
I know it is only peripherally related (if at all) but I always wondered "Why did Reconstruction fail?". The GOP could have kept most of their opposition in the South out of power and at the same time create a loyal voter base by giving to the freedmen and taking from the traitors. Why did they not do it? And why did they give up the gains that they did have so fast and for basically nothing in return? Now I know even Northern white abolitionists were racists for the most part, but do you think Reconstruction was doomed to fail from the beginning? Also, I think Ulysses S Grant is one of the most underrated Presidents (the other being Carter) mostly due to Reconstruction being vilified by the white Southerners who for the most part wrote the history of the South. Just thought to put that out there. Pizzameister (talk) 02:16, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Reconstruction was the best possible result of the war. The world isn't all sunshine and blowjobs, there was no way in hell the South was going to transition from slavery to egality overnight.  Not without much more bloodshed than had already occurred. CorruptUser (talk) 02:21, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Why did they give up? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877) I bet some GOPers thought, "handing over the presidency to the Dems is the same as ending Reconstruction anyway, might as well hold on to some power". 02:47, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it's easy to look back on history and call them cowards, but if you lived through the bloodiest war the US had ever seen, and then another decade of constant fighting and stress, you'd just throw your hands up and call it a day too. I mean, look at Iraq today.  We broke it we bought it, but after a decade we just said fuck it and left.  Then it went to shit after we fixed it, and by "fixed" I mean "established death squads, again, returning Iraq to stability".  Speaking of which, should we have an article on those death squads?  The Sons of Iraq.  Ima go suhjest dat. CorruptUser (talk) 04:17, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
 * I don't think it went wrong in 1877 (even though that was rather dumb), I think it all went wrong in 1865. What they should have done is this: Disenfranchise all traitors. Hang the most outrageous traitors as well as high ranking war criminals. Bust the plantation trust and give (most of) the land to poor whites and freedmen. Invest federal dollars (maybe from expropriated traitors) into education for freedmen. Make regiments of freedmen keep watch over the reconstructed states. Some of them were majority African American. No way in hell armed black people who are the majority cave before the KKK. But unfortunately there were too many doughfaces in the North who had more sympathies for traitors than for freedmen. However, maybe it could have worked if Lincoln had been assassinated along with his VP (as the traitors around Booth had initially planned). That would have put either new elections onto the table or someone into the white house who has no sympathies of any kind for the traitors who just murdered the President. But unfortunately Reconstruction was so fucked up we did not even get the amount of African Americans in Congress today that we got in those first optimistic years... Pizzameister (talk) 17:41, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
 * In which case the South would not have surrendered, or the war would've restarted, the Union generals and soldiers would not have gone along with it, etc. Keep in mind that a quarter of the people from the South who fought in the war fought for the North.  You are going to have some serious morale issues if that were to occur... CorruptUser (talk) 19:25, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Who would have done the fighting? Most of the plantation owners did not serve in the military themselves. If you expropriate them and give their property to the poor whites who largely made up the Confederate military and the Freedmen who are at that point a natural ally of the GOP how on earth could they have fought on? And the "fighting on" that did happen (the KKK) was squashed handily and rapidly by the only President of the postbellum-era who actually did shit, U.S. Grant. In 1865 the South was utterly and totally destroyed. The North could have rebuilt it as a more egalitarian society. They could have destroyed the landed gentry. They chose not to. Pizzameister (talk) 19:30, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Moving to mainspace. Will flesh out more this weekend. CorruptUser (talk) 05:30, 11 March 2016 (UTC)