History shows the exact opposite. In 1860, Massachusetts had more immigrants than the whole Confederacy. The mudsill theory was popular and many slaveholders despised Yankees as a mongrel races for having so many foreigners. A victorious Confederacy would become even more convinced of their racial superiority and even less accepting of immigrants.
At least some states of the Confederacy will re-enslave free blacks, since some slaveholding states had tried before the Civil War. Then they'll try to enslave the Indians. Then the Latinos. Then probably the Catholic Irish, some southern leaders had advocated enslaving poor whites before the Civil War.
I'm not so sure about enslaving Latinos or Catholic Irishmen.....but legalizing peonage for them might not be so far-fetched, especially in the more reactionary states, like S.C. and Mississippi.....
There were prominent slaveholders in the south who wanted to enslave whites (beyond their own relatives in the quarters, of course)...a CSA that gained independence (how is unmentioned, which is a pretty huge question) would be - along with putting down revolts from various cities, towns, counties, states and petty confederacies that wanted to secede from the secessionists - focused on finding more slaves...
Arkansas had (in 1860, IIRC) passed legislation that required free blacks to leave the state or be enslaved; the initial obvious targets in an independent CSA would be:
a) free blacks (gens du colour et al); and with the one-drop rule, that's all it would take;
b) non-whites (indigenous and partly indigenous people would fall under the one-drop rule, as would many people of partly Spanish ancestry);
c) whites without economic resources...
Basically, all the pathologies of the casta system would drop, to be replaced by the enslaved and those with the economic resources to "not" be enslaved...
Cannibals All! as Fitzhugh said...
Best,
Maybe, but wouldn't some of these whites, at least, themselves rebel against such a prospect?
The Klan existed in a system where they had power, but not absolute authority. If you put the Klan in charge of a country wracked with class divisions and slave revolts, they would absolutely consider genocide, or at least the killing of large numbers of slaves to 'teach them a lesson'.
Unfortunately, that may not indeed be so farfetched.
I've never understood why people are so intent on defending the Confederacy; they're among the top of modern history's Rogues' Gallery, up there with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.
Can't argue with that, sadly.
It should be noted that the first three Jewish U.S. Senators (including the first practicing Jew) were all from the South. The first two were Judah Benjamin of Louisiana and David Levy Yulee of Florida; both married gentile women, and their children were raised as Christian. The third was Benjamin Jonas, also of Louisiana, who served from 1879 to 1885. All were Democrats. Ironically, Jonas' parents, who lived in Illinois, were Republicans and friends of Abraham Lincoln.
Interesting, I suppose. Though I bet raising their kids as Christians probably really helped in the long run, TBH, speaking of the former two.
Another root was the urbanization of the U.S. The 1920 Census reported, for the first time, that a majority of Americans lived in cities. The shock of this contributed to the failure of Congress to reappportion the House in that decade - the only such failure, and perhaps to the explosive growth of the Ku Klux Klan at that time.
The South was consciously agrarian, and remained rural while the rest of the country urbanized around it. If the South was politically separated from the urbanized U.S., ISTM that Southerners would feel less threatened and be less reactionary.
Maybe, but I'm not so convinced of the latter, though. Even before the Civil War, the South had it's own nativist streak, including that of those who supported the Fire-Eaters.
The rebels were also happy enough to kill whites who didn't agree with them, as witness the Nueces Massacre (interesting contrast with the fate of the Showalter Party in California):
http://www.civilwar.org/civil-war-discovery-trail/sites/treue-der-union-monument.html
And, of course, the Colfax Massacre makes it clear how peaceful the south was after Appomattox; what it would be like after a rebel victory can only be imagined.
Best,
And I'm sure there were a fair number of other, lesser-known incidents, as well.
That makes no sense whatsoever. The entirety of the civil war was an effort by the Southern aristocracy to repudiate an almost entirely hypothetical threat to their absolute control of their region and their dominance of American politics as a whole. They were prepared to break the union and sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives against imaginary threats. I don't see that sort of personality being accommodating or magnanimous at any step of the way. Basically, they were fire breathing assholes through and through.
South Carolina is something of a special case, as it had an reactionary extremist streak to it for much of its early history. South Carolina provoked the first and second secession crises, the second of which of course led to the Civil War. It was also the last state to allow direct election of presidential electors, sometime in the 1860s after the Civil War.
So Tillman may have been a reactionary extremist, but unfortunately that was par the course for 1800s South Carolina.
Sad but true.
In some cases being a smaller minority group leads to less discrimination. The United States around the time of the Civil Rights movement might not be the best comparison, but I've heard that racism wasn't really the typical North and South divide that people often think of. Some people have said that they experienced worse racism in the North than in the South, mostly in areas with large minority populations, while it wasn't that bad in smaller towns where they might be only ethnic or religious minority.
There is some truth to that, but I've noticed that, in a good number of cases, it's actually the opposite on both sides of the Mason Dixon line. (i.e., more diversity = less racism. Which makes sense in at least some situations).
Then you consider that the Confederacy is going to be focused on keeping down a large portion of its population that is enslaved or (later on) free but threatening to their continued dominance of the situation, and some of the racism might be relaxed. When you look at the history of colonies and even South Africa, the ruling elite (ironically in the Confederacy, African-Americans might be the majority) tends to expand membership to other groups, even some members of the majority group that is being oppressed. It might go from the WASP elite to the elite in general, then WASPs in general, and then perhaps out to ethnic and religious minorities in general.
That may perhaps happen, if the Confederacy loosens up a bit in the long run. But it's a pretty big IF, though, TBH.
I don't see too much reenslavement or enslavement occurring, because that could kick off something akin to the South African embargoes decades earlier. Enslavement of Catholics and white people certainly won't win the Confederacy favor among the European or Union public.
Which is part of the reason I suggested peonage as an alternative.
My experience of human nature is that people and cultures who are utter shits following a defeat, will tend to be horrorshows when they get their hands on victory.
Essentially, an asshole is an asshole, a dysfunctional culture remains dysfunctional. The Confederate South was a society so psychopathically wedded, both ideologically, commercially and politically to racial superiority and oppression that they started a war over it. Having lost that war, they simply re-instituted oppression in any way they could. I don't think that winning would make them better people. It would just make them more confident and unrestrained in their brutality.
Sadly, you do have a good point.