In particular, 1865 was a moment when reparations and land reform were actually feasible. Late in the war, some of Lincoln’s generals — notably Sherman — had mitigated their slave-refugee problem by letting emancipated slaves farm small plots on the plantations that had been abandoned by their Confederate owners. Sick or injured animals unable to advance with the Army were left behind for the slaves to nurse back to health and use. (Hence “forty acres and a mule”.) Sherman’s example might have become a land-reform model for the entire Confederacy, dispossessing the slave-owning aristocrats in favor of the people whose unpaid labor had created their wealth.

Instead, President Johnson (himself a former slave-owner from Tennessee) was quick to pardon the aristocrats and restore their lands. [3] That created a dynamic that has been with us ever since: Early in Reconstruction, white and black working people sometimes made common cause against their common enemies in the aristocracy. But once it became clear that the upper classes were going to keep their ill-gotten holdings, freedmen and working-class whites were left to wrestle over the remaining slivers of the pie. Before long, whites who owned little land and had never owned slaves had become the shock troops of the planters’ bid to restore white supremacy.

Along the way, the planters created rhetoric you still hear today: The blacks were lazy and would rather wait for gifts from the government than work (in conditions very similar to slavery). In this way, the idle planters were able to paint the freedmen as parasites who wanted to live off the hard work of others.

Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party | The Weekly Sift

I grew up in the south, in a rural community where slave-holding plantations were the center of the economy for most of the 19th century, and reading this was like puzzle pieces snapping (loudly) into place. This so accurately describes the community and mentality even now.

And it reinforces what I’ve always believed and told others: for many in the south, the Civil War never ended. If you want to see how little time changes anything, go live in one of these small, Southern communities. 150 years ago is a blink. It’s nothing. And it doesn’t change nearly as much as you would think or hope, cell phones and flush toilets notwithstanding.

(via rhpolitics)