First failed American occupation

 The failure of Reconstruction after the first Civil War reveals the near impossibility of holding Americans under a political regime they won’t tolerate. The North won the war but couldn’t stomach occupation. “What really happens? The Northern forces struggle, undergunned, undermanned, with provisional support from the government, a very small occupying force up to 1877, and every year everybody’s looking at their watch saying ‘Are we done yet?’ ” Bolger says. “So what happens? The African American population that’s nominally free becomes peons with almost no rights by 1877, basically disenfranchised in every practical sense, and the people in the North accepted it because they knew they couldn’t do anything about it. They weren’t going to kill every single Southerner.” The compromise of 1877 was ultimately the retreat of federal power. “The South got essentially home rule,” Bolger says. Reconstruction was in a sense the first failed American occupation.

 

Union brigadier general James S. Brisbin was sent to pacify the white South during Reconstruction. “These people are not loyal; they are only conquered,” he wrote back. “I tell you there is not as much loyalty in the South today as there was the day Lee surrendered to Grant. The moment they lost their cause in the field they set about to gain by politics what they had failed to obtain by force of arms.” In the disputes over the election of Rutherford Hayes in 1876, the election with the highest turnout in American history (over 80 percent), both sides claimed victories in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. An informal deal was struck to give Hayes the presidency in exchange for pulling federal troops from the South, essentially ceding the whole region to white supremacy. The Redeemers came back to power and immediately disenfranchised Black voters. They called it the Compromise of 1877. Compromise was the cost of the union.

(The Next Civil War Dispatches from the American Future by Marche, Stephen)