> i don't believe that the Republicans were nearly as united as you
> suggest.
>
> On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 01:04:54PM -0400, SA wrote:
>
>> Yes. The Republicans' intention was to revolutionize the South, not
>> to leave behind a Jim Crow state. (C. Vann Woodward showed decades
>> ago that Jim Crow only began after the crushing of Populism, in
>> 1896-1900.) It turned out, though, that they had underestimated how
>> revolutionary they needed to be to achieve their ends - e.g., they
>> would have needed to redistribute property. Nothing in the American
>> political tradition prepared them to do any such thing, so while a
>> few of the most advanced Republicans supported such radical steps,
>> the bulk of Northern opinion felt that with Reconstruction they had
>> stumbled a "quagmire" and that they needed an "exit strategy."
>>
When I say "the Republicans' intention was to revolutionize the South," I mean in the aftermath of the war, when even the moderates realized that in the absence of a reconstruction of Southern society the Bourbons would retake power. There was, after all, a Reconstruction. Congress did pass the initial Radical proposals, create the Freedmen's Bureau, etc. They just weren't willing to go nearly as far they would have needed to.
SA