The relevance of a doctrine's being

[Ilya Somin]

Well, many of the Radical Republicans wanted to go well beyond "hanging
50 people" and instead wanted to 1) use federal troops to enforce the
rights of southern blacks (actually done to a certain extent by Grant), 2)
redistribute some of the slaveowners' property to the former slaves, and
3) use federal patronage to build political coalitions between blacks and
unionist southern whites. We can't know for sure whether a more aggressive
pursuit of 1-3 would have changed the course of history, but we certainly
can't dismiss the possibility out of hand. In particularly, having a
president sympathetic to this agenda in the 3 years immediately following
the Civil War might have made it easier to carry out than it was under the
hostile Andrew Johnson. It's hard to say how far Lincoln would have gone
in supporting 1-3 above, but he was certainly more sympathetic than
Johnson, a Democrat who had been put on the 1864 ticket for
ticket-balancing reasons.

Ilya SOmin



On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Mark Graber wrote:

> How much would malice toward the leaders of the Confederacy matter.  The
> Republican theory was that secession was sponsored by a few hotheads,
> and that lots of southern whites were really nascent Republicans.  If
> this was right, then maybe stringing up a few leaders would have worked.
>  But isn't it the case that a) you didn;t need to string up a few
> leaders to prevent a secession reprise, since that was settled at
> appomattox (spelling approximate), and b) you would need more like a
> KILLING FIELDS scenario to promote racial equality in the south, given
> how deeply entrenched and popular white supremacy was in that region.
> Alternatively, and more seriously than stringing up a few people, the
> better strategy might have been to disarm all Confederates, arm all
> former slaves and put them completely in control for a generation or so.
>  But hang the 50 people of your choice, and I don't think history is
> much different.
>
> Mark A. Graber
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