Question of the Week: What would you change about Reconstruction?
If you could go back in time and change, alter, or eliminate one Reconstrcution law or policy, what would it be and why?
If you could go back in time and change, alter, or eliminate one Reconstrcution law or policy, what would it be and why?
strengthen the 15th amendment by providing a positive guarantee of voting rights, not the negative guarantee that only penalized states if they imposed restrictions such as literacy tests and poll taxes. This may have been all that was achievable at the time, given northern as well as Southern states desire to limit immigrant, Chinese, and black voting, but it was what allowed southern states to impose restrictions on voting by both blacks and poor whites, with little fear of losing representation in Congress or the Electoral College. Eliminating black suffrage and office holding then led to white redemption of state governments and Jim Crow.
In light of what’s happening today ( though hindsight is an impossibility), fleshing out the meaning of birthright citizenship as proposed in the 14th Amendment.
Congress should have enforced and expanded Sherman’s Field Order No. 15. Land re-distribution (with protection enforced guarantees) was the best route to building wealth and stability for freedmen and freedwomen.
Andrew Johnson
Good one. Mine is, have Lincoln’s body guard man his post on April 14. Is that asking too much? Maybe his death, Lincoln’s not the bodyguard’s, was fated, as Booth seemed pretty dead set on his murderous algorithm but had only Seward been attacked that night, maybe Booth would have been rounded up.
1. Rebuilding the defeated South should have been removed from the Reconstruction program, rebranded as Build Back Better, and given to the individual States to accomplish (under arm’s-length supervision of Federal authority.) The South had every incentive to rebuild itself; all that was required was access to materials.
2. Reconstruction should have been a Federal program focused on educating Freedmen and preparing them for citizenship and participation in the workforce. [This had been initiated in 1862 with Freedmen Camps near Corinth Mississippi; and later near Vicksburg in 1863, where Blacks were also employed as cooks and, ultimately, as USCT soldiers.]
It still makes me wonder in disbelief how little security there was for political leaders and especially the Executive Branch. Even more so during/after the Civil War. Lincoln should have had multiple layers of body guards and levels of security. If he had survived I believe that rebuilding and repatriation would have been many orders of magnitude better.
Keep federal troops in the South after 1877 rather than deploying them every time some cheap southern politiician attempted to prevent desegregation: Orville Faubus, George Wallace, etc.
I’d write something brilliant that would enrage the Noble Causers…but Mike Maxwell already wrote it. See what he posted above.