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We can't answer the question of how things would have been different had there not been an attempt at establishing racial equality under Reconstruction. Some have made radical Reconstruction a bogey-man, but racial attitudes being what they were and anger already having been produced by the war and the destruction it brought it's hard to see how things could have been different. The most lenient approach to Reconstruction would probably have brought about pretty much the same results -- and sooner.

Your statistic is interesting, but it doesn't establish a connection between Reconstruction and the decline of Black craftsmen. Without major efforts at fighting segregation and racial discrimination, emancipation would inevitably have meant that Whites would hire other Whites more often than they would hire Blacks. But still, it was an improvement over slavery.

In arguing that the problem of race couldn't have been easily resolved you are taking a line similar to that of Lincoln. That perception is one reason why he put Union above emancipation. Had Southern political leaders remained in the Union, they could have avoided the results that you deplore. The Union eventually allowed for a dispersion of the Black population and a decrease of racial tensions. But that wasn't what the secessionist militants wanted.

You have too many assumptions, again, for me to even try to respond to all of them. I will just point out one area, which may by implication also relate to some of the others.

Your assumption that with emancipation, whites would naturally hire other whites over the freedmen, is not borne out by the survey which the chief Actuary for the Prudential Insurance Company conducted on the subject in 1895. He found much the attitude to which Booker T. Washington appealed in the same era--that there was if anything a sentimental bond between the more affluent whites and their ex slaves, and that the poor whites were seen as much more difficult to get along with--less desirable as employees.

You may not want to admit that it was the egalitarian rant of the Reconstruction demagogues, which undermined Negro society; but we have seen exactly the same process repeated with respect to the egalitarian rant of the "Civil Rights" movement. Just look at what has happened to crime and illegitimacy statistics, contemporaneous with the imagined "gains" from what was and is, inherently, a Socialist movement.

You cannot destroy the cultural images of a people and substitute leftwing fantasies without taking a terrible toll. (I must sound like a broken record, but we address the images of the old South--the images on which people could have built a better life for both races in the 20th Century--in The Persuasive Use Of Images.)

William Flax

I had thought that Lincoln both secured the nomination and won the election largely on his ability to argue the cause of Federal authority to limit expansion of slavery in the Territories, the touchstone of the southern states fear of being hemmed in by added "Free" states. Wasn't the deceiding factor in his contest his Cooper Union Speech wherein he demonstrated an ability to prove that Federal authority by showing how each of the signers held on actual later votes on issues surrounding such authority?

And if that was how he was elected, isn't it clear that the claim that he held that as President, that he didn't have authority to abolish of prohibit slavery in the south (short of actions precipitated by a civil war), whatever his personal feelings on the matter, a clear indication that the south was the initiator rather than the north?

Why is the issue constantly framed by his limited emancipation proclamation that was given grudgingly late in the game after he stepped away from such actions numerous times in the prior three years?