William Dunning in his Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics (1897, 2nd ed. 1904) says that at the various Southern state Constitutional Conventions held in the two to three years after the war, one topic discussed was blacks taking legal action against slaveholders who continued to hold them in slavery after the Emancipation Proclamation. Anyone know anything about these proposals?
You can find the brief mention of this on page 195 of Dunning’s Essays. Here is a link to the book.
Here is the passage:
Slavery was quite clearly not “the law of the land” in many parts of the South after January 1m 1863. Those who continued to hold slaves in the areas where Lincoln’s proclamation had freed them would have seemed to be in a questionable legal position, to say the least.
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I believe the time for reparations was during reconstruction and it didn’t have to be the southern states that implemented it.
The Federal government in their military occupation of the south could have mandated it. The slaves had a legitimate grievance and the righting of this atrocity against them should have come in the form of land and money from those who owned them.
I would not have fought the war. I would have let the south go. Even the freeing of the slaves was not worth this calamity that took over 600,000 men on both sides. I believe that slavery would have ended in the south as they became more isolated in the family of nations.
However, once the war was fought, the North should have been the protector of the former slaves and the steward of land reform (and whatever money that the slave owners had) and awarded the them a good chunk of the south in compensation and atonement for the grotesque injustice they suffered.
If the North had remained in the south for a couple of generations rather than a dozen or so years (less in some parts) we could have seen (I believe) a dying out of the generation that was almost congenitally monomaniacal in their racism, and the beginning of a real equality under the law, instead of 100 more years of oppression under Jim Crow.
That may be too optimistic a view, but I believe it could have happened.