The south was unable to recover economically for nearly a hundred years due to reconstruction policies.
That’s getting off easy?
I think not.
To this day there remains a strong bias against southerners portarying them as ignorant, uneducated racists.
That isn’t “getting off easy” by any measure.
You know this because as I recall your family is from Mississippi isn’t it?
Oh I know. The South was destroyed by the war. Especially Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas and Georgia. I’d argue that MS, LA, and AL, and Arkansas still haven’t completely recovered from it.
The other former Confederate states recovered more quickly, but it was still decades before it was all fixed.
I don’t think the feds intentionally meant for that to happen. I think it was the result of the entire southern economy being obliterated by the war and the end of slavery. Entirely new industries had to arise in the south before we could recover.
Samm
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That was the official response. In the real world, southerners were treated very poorly by northerners for decades and CSA veterans were often treated like lepers. That is why the vast majority of these Confederate Memorial statues were not erected until after about 1910 … after a new generation who had not participated in the war, were running society.
In the case of northerners in the aftermath of the war, that’s perfectly understandable. Most of them lost brothers or cousins or fathers. All due to southern aggression. We started the war. Not the north. The war left 700,000 dead, equivalent to around 6 million Americans today with the populations scaled. There would be some bad blood in the aftermath.
It’s basically like Germany after both World Wars. It’s completely understandable that the people who fought against Germany held a strong grudge for decades after the war. Especially the Russians and the French. Today, it’s uncalled for and any Yankee who rags on the modern south today can go screw theirselves. But I don’t blame the people who lived in 1870-1910 for holding a grudge. We did cause a war that left a third of the country in ruins.
And that new generation of Southerners made the exact same mistakes their fathers made. They just couldn’t accept that their fellow black southerners were equal. Jim Crow, the poll tax, the literacy test… They went so far out of their way to oppress their fellow blacks that they also disenfranchised and oppress an entire generation of white southerners too.
Grant specifically targeted the infrastructure and economy. It became a war of privation.
Reconstruction was designed to punish the South for Generations and it worked.
