As I said before the way the South dominates the American political system, and the overall national culture with that rancid background of racial nastiness everywhere now, and skews American religion with all of the right-leaning Southern evangelicals and fundamentalists out-influencing moderate Christianity, an outside observer who has no knowledge at all of the actual history should be forgiven for thinking that the Confederacy actually won the Civil War.
Anyway, I'm much nastier than you'll ever be on this subject. If I had been there and in charge, post-Lincoln, I would have made them howl in agony worse than Sherman did. Post war this is what I would have done to the South to put a stop to all this insanity the Lost Cause mythologizing and federal tolerance of Jim Crow has led to:
1) ethnic separation generally leads to stability and some kind of peace, therefore I would have kicked all the whites out of Mississippi, Alabama, northern Florida, and the bottom hundred miles of south Georgia and handed all the land over to the blacks; in addition all blacks living in the other Southern states would be encouraged to relocate to the new all-black domain for their own safety from reprisals by Confederate hold-outs; these states would be given a minimum of ten representatives and three senators each to keep them from being outnumbered and isolated in Congress; the rest of the South would be occupied and run by military governors, with a minimum of 150,000 federal troops garrisoning each Southern state, for a minimum of twenty five years and not be allowed to participate in Congress until 1900
2) the plantation system would have been broken forever, with the land being seized by the federal government and auctioned off in parcels no larger than fifty acres; small farms would be encouraged, with the feds overseeing all sales and exchanges in order to ensure the old Southern nobility didn't do an end-run using straw buyers and fake companies to re-establish their monopoly and land empires
3) participation and membership in the KKK or any other similar terrorist group would be grounds for summary execution under military occupational law
4) the police forces of all major Southern cities would be comprised of federal troops only; the city councils and mayor's positions would be abolished until 1900 and civilian administration duties would be performed by appointees of the military governors
5) the Southern state legal and prison systems, which even today rival third-world countries for their backwardness, horrific nature, and notorious use as a pool for slave labour, would be abolished permanently and taken over entirely by the federal government and staffed entirely by personnel from Union states only
6) the Southern states and counties would be permanently banned from organizing and running their own election systems; all election activities would be permanently taken over as a duty of the federal government
To accomplish all this the Constitution would be re-negotiated and re-written as required. Southern representatives will not be allowed to participate in either the debates or the voting of the revision process.
What we did with Germany and Japan to ensure the Nazi and imperial plague was permanently burnt away should have been done to the Confederate South. If it had been then this evil rotten old ghost of Southern politics and social status wouldn't still be wandering across the United States today, spreading it's infection of bitterness and hate from one end of the country to the other. The Confederates were NOT the good guys and it's a damn shame that even a single person today might think that they ever were.
PS: I am NOT a liberal but I clearly am a monster of an entirely different sort.
CKA Uber 
CKA Moderator 
