General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The South was not sufficiently punished after the war [View all]Igel
(35,300 posts)There was none to little.
The result was a depressed South that bred illiteracy and resentment with former institutions largely broken and none to replace them--on top of the humiliation of having lost the war with much of its infrastructure intentionally destroyed and 10s of thousands not just dead but dead and insulted. By modern standards, Sherman was a war criminal. It led to poverty, and the reason for the humiliation, poverty, and backwardness was trumpeted: It was done to free the slaves. Mix blacks as the target of resentment in with all the other humiliations and resentment in a large area kept largely poor because it suited the industrial North ... Instead of shared prosperity in an area already riven before the war by deep economic divides but held together by a sense of cultural and geographic unity we got intensified scapegoating, and it's alive and well. "I'd be better off if not for ____________." When we have a problem, the first person we blame is somebody else, preferably of different ethnicity. Such a lovely legacy that was nurtured in Dixie and exported in the 20th century. Some even consider it a virtue.
The US reaped what it sowed. Lincoln's idea was betrayed and falsified (even if it's now considered wrong-headed). The kind of punishment some wanted was partially meted out. Minus the jackboots.
The field command applicable just for a specific area to divide land and hand out "40 acres and a mule" to help displaced people and jump-start food production became a myth that also bred resentment, a promise never made but which was considered broken. The freedom and condescending "uplift" that was promised never resulted in anything large-scale enough to amount to much.
Pyrrhic victory. The kind of forcible reconstruction the OP calls for just wasn't doable on so many levels. Even the German and Japanese examples fail to meet his sense of supremacy and vengefulness. The Japanese one is especially inappropriate, culturally speaking.