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In the period immediately following the end of the Civil War and Lincoln\u2019s assassination, former Vice President Andrew Johnson favored leniency toward the rebellious states, but the Radical Republican faction gained control over Congress in 1866 and pushed for civil rights, protections, and social-welfare efforts for the freed slaves, overriding Johnson\u2019s vetoes.\u00a0 In 1868, President Ulysses S. Grant replaced Johnson and continued the Radical Republicans\u2019 policies, including combatting the KKK, essentially wiping them out by 1872.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the South was in a state of martial law\/military occupation, and, to varying degrees, former Confederate soldiers were barred from voting until the 1872 Amnesty Act.\u00a0 \u00a0However, political support faded, white paramilitary groups gained power, and by 1877, as part of a bargain to place Republican Rutherford Hayes into office, Union army troops were withdrawn from the last three states where they had continued as an occupying force, setting the stage for Jim Crow laws, the loss of the right to vote by Southern blacks, the Tulsa Massacre, Woodrow Wilson\u2019s re-segregation of the U.S. government, and so on.\u00a0 \u00a0(Yes, that\u2019s from Wikipedia<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Of course \u201c40 acres and a mule\u201d is now a part of the ongoing claims for reparations \u2014 that is, the claim that the freedmen were promised this during Reconstruction, but that this promise was broken, so the government has a responsibility to pay its debt.\u00a0 And there\u2019s a sense that somehow the federal government did something wrong that, had it not made this mistake, the former slaves would have had their happily-ever-after after all, and the continued racism experienced since then wouldn\u2019t have happened.<\/p>\n Yet at the same time, Reconstruction, to some degree or another, lasted for 15 years.\u00a0 We are now going on 20 years of military presence in Afghanistan. And, indeed, for many years, when Democrats (and anti-interventionists, generally speaking) called for us to leave the country, I believed we needed to stay, needed to try harder to get the \u201cnation-building\u201d right, because I was horrified at the prospect of leaving the country and abandoning women and girls to the fate they had suffered under the Taliban before the arrival of the U.S.: banned from education, banned from leaving home, forced to wear a burqa.\u00a0 And indeed, as the Taliban resume control, they are kicking girls out of school once again<\/a>. It\u2019s terrible.\u00a0 But there also comes a point at which we have to admit that the American military cannot perpetually fight this battle, cannot indefinitely rationalize that we just didn\u2019t get it right in the past.\u00a0 Could the military leadership have done a better job with its nation-building efforts?\u00a0 Could they have prevented corruption, convinced the people that becoming a \u201ccivilized\u201d country with education, economic development, and democratic governance is worth fighting for, rather than just being passively provided goodies by the rich West, if only Americans had tried harder and been smarter about it?\u00a0 Or is the culture and mindset of Afghans so radically different that our way of seeing the world never made sense to them and had no real chance of taking hold?\u00a0 Especially after reading<\/a> Joseph Henrich\u2019s The Weirdest People in the World<\/em>, I became convinced that the latter is more likely, however much it feels that that this is no more than abandoning women and girls to a terrible fate.\u00a0 (And yes, I am dodging the question of where to draw the line, and what more extreme level of injustice warrants staying in the fight as long as it takes, in perpetuity if need me.)<\/p>\n You can see where I\u2019m going with this: without engaging in the exercise of condemning Northern politicians and voters for their decisions in the aftermath of the Civil War and their unwillingness to stay the course in pursuit of justice and economic assistance for the freedmen, is there a path toward understanding what went wrong, and whether the actual outcome of reconstruction was a matter of decisions and events that might have gone the other way (Lincoln not shot, one more Senator being willing to impeach Johnson, etc.), or whether it simply is not a Thing That Can Happen for outsiders to effect this sort of change.<\/p>\n All that being said, you might wonder why I\u2019m thinking about this now and that gets me to a twitter back-and-forth, or, rather, a series of responses to my tweet, itself a reply to another tweet, about Reconstruction:<\/p>\n The Post-Reconstruction South reminds me to some extent of the (presumed) future of Afghanistan when the U.S. military completely pulls out. Should the Union army have stayed indefinitely?<\/p>\n \u2014 Jane the Actuary (@JanetheActuary) June 23, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n