I'm fairly old (over 60) (1) and read textbooks throughout school that taught that Reconstruction was at best misguided do-goodism and at worst criminal oppression of white southerners by vindictive Radical Republicans. (2) It was a policy favored by vicious extremists who abandoned Lincoln's fair and humane treatment of the South, and probably the biggest mistake in American history that turned good Southerners into racists. Seriously! And these books were published in Chicago and New York! Nary a peep about what blacks in the South endured or thought. You need to remember that, even into the mid 20th century, blacks basically didn't register in American popular culture, and "Birth of a Nation" was not yet seen as the racist diatribe that it is. History was interpreted through the eyes of white people and largely judged by its effect on white people. (3)
1) I'm 54.
2) Depending on just HOW old you are exactly and just WHERE
you were raised, you could have expected to have been fed poisonous Dunning Thesis claptrap up until the 1960s. If you grew up in the South, God knows when the textbooks were finally updated.
Consider: No Reconstruction historian of ANY stature was a NON-Southerner prior to the 1960s. Small wonder if you were fed this nonsense. You didn't see terms like "carpetbaggers" or "scalawags" in MY textbooks growing up, other than that they were used by the KKK against Yankees moving South after the war, or against Southern Whites co-operating with Reconstruction.
3) Beautifully put. A classic and infamous case of history
starting out as Historical Negationism, requiring very heavy Historical Revisionism in the 60s to produce genuine Historical Fact. Funny. Its usually the other way around.
The internet is filled with Negationists, but thankfully Ian keeps a tight collar on them here.
Texas and Virginia could probably go it alone but many of the other states probably can't (but Virginia could probably be coaxed back with minimal effort). My guess is the Union probably tries to coax back the border states because they'll probably require minimum effort and bloodshed. Once that happens I suspect they'd wait and see what happened with the rest.
By border states, can I assume you mean those states south of the actually identified states as belonging top the OTL terms Border States? I.E., Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri?
If so, that means Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and the Indian Territory. IDK whether any of these states will respond to 'coaxing', short of some kind of Jake Featherstone/Vlad Tepes turn in CSA politics. The Union has already drawn on so much political capital by keeping the Border States loyal.
A massive slave revolt could never get off the ground. The Southern States would stomp it before it got well under way. You might get some escapees making nuisances of themselves from hideouts in the Dismal Swamp and/or Louisianan Bayous, but that's likely to be about it.
Indeed. One of the reasons the South did so well at the start of the ACW was that the Antebellum South by 1860 was an armed camp, plus they had a military tradition. Consider: Even as late as 1941 the US Army Officer Corps was of 75% White Southerner extraction!
While control of communications and movement within the South wasn't up to Okhrana levels, they were certainly heading in that direction.