The Trouble with Civil War Hypotheticals

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With the exception of the brief interval of Reconstruction, the states of the former Confederacy have been able to exert as much influence on national affairs and on matters of race as they had before the Civil War, and possibly more. Having lost the quest to maintain slavery, they put in place sharecropping—a system of agricultural serfdom—which was dominant for the next eight decades. Prior to the Civil War, slaveholding states held a disproportionate influence in Congress, because the census counted sixty per cent of the enslaved population—people who could not vote—in apportioning representation. After the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, the census counted the entire black population, but the regime of white terrorism that followed Reconstruction insured that these African-Americans could not vote, either. Thus, Southern white political power was amplified after the war by the mere existence of disfranchised African-Americans living in Southern states.

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