Replies

Levy78: "People resent their homes being invaded by authoritarian libs."

By which you mean Radical Democrats, then as now willing to fight & destroy their country to preserve their own legal privileges over other Americans.
In the 1860s Radical Democrat (aka "Confederates") forces invaded Union lands of:

Maryland
Kentucky
Missouri
Pennsylvania
Ohio
Indiana
Kansas
Oklahoma
New Mexico
West Virginia
Others too...

jeffersondem: "Even southerners could not image just how toxic the coming Union victory would be."

Sure, a lot of slavers had problems with the new 13th, 14th & 15th Amendments, but it didn't last long -- as soon as Reconstruction ended in 1876, Radical Democrats went to work nullifying those Amendments for nearly 100 years.

Today Radical Democrats are as violent as they were in the 1860s, but our problem is that Republicans no longer have the courage & backbones of our 1860s' ancestors.

jeffersondem: "Still, there are those today that say everything turned out just fine once the federal governemnt was in total control."

The Federal government was never in total control after the election of 1876 ending Reconstruction.
Then Radical Democrats took over the South and effectively reversed Civil War outcomes.

“The Federal government was never in total control after the election of 1876 ending Reconstruction.”

Union bayonets won a glorious victory and now you don’t want to own it!

By your telling within four years of the disaster at Appomattox the South had the strength to force a corrupt Grant administration on the nation.

The Radical Republicans were mostly interested in political control. When they realized that they could be the dominant political party while writing off the South, they did so. A few of them may have been genuinely interested in uplifting the freedmen but most Northerners of that time were just as prejudiced towards black people as white Southerners were. Between 1860 and 1912 only one Democrat won election to the Presidency (Grover Cleveland, twice), and Wilson only won in 1912 because the Republicans split between Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.