Why didn't anti-abolitionists stop the Redeemers

[Cheung Mo]

Abandoning the Radical Republicans and ensuring that African-Americans would spend generations living as third-class citizens was the greatest crime and the greatest betrayal ever committed by European-American "progressives" and "leftists".

The Radical Republicans sould have ensured that anyone who supported Africa-American slavery was permanently disenfranchised from the political process via a bullet in the back of their head and the Union Army should have stayed there until all the fascists and the racialists were wiped out.

[Martin Blank]

The Radical Republicans weren't the ones who abandoned the struggle, it was the "progressive" wing of the capitalists who initially backed the RadReps that abandoned the fight. They did it for class reasons.

In the latter years of Reconstruction, class struggle was sharpening to the point where the capitalists were fearful that they would not be able to stop working people from winning large gains at their expense. So, the Northern capitalists made a deal with their Southern counterparts, to free up the military and make them available for dealing with an insurgent working class.

(Washington also needed more troops to suppress Native American uprisings in the West. Remember, the U.S. defeat at Little Big Horn was in 1876, less than one year before the Great Betrayal that ended Reconstruction.)

Many RadReps (and Red Republicans) and militant abolitionists like Wendell Phillipps became well known social-democratic leaders in the 1870s and 1880s, and worked with the International Working Men's Association and Workingmen's Party of the U.S.

Miles

[Cheung Mo]

The Radical Republicans had the right idea: It was merely their unwillingess to go beyond merely keeping racialists out of office and confiscating some of their property that was the problem. Did they not go further because Northern capitalists refused to give them the means to do so or were they under the delusion that White supremacists nonetheless deserve to be treated like human beings?

[Martin Blank]

From my understanding of that period, many RadReps had no problem not only depriving Southerners of their rights, but some even advocated more extreme measures (e.g., mass deportation). Southern whites were seen as having given up their rights by supporting secession, and so they were often regarded by Northern radicals as beneath them.

Have you read Eric Foner's Reconstruction? If not, I highly recommend it.

Miles

[Janus]

Reconstruction was basically a failure as it failed to solve the economic problems of the African American population or restructure their economic plight. Thereofre, their political status may have changed but their social-economic status never did. When Reconstruction was formally ended by the Compromise of 1877, there was nothing stopping the re-emergence of white supremacy in the South.