With how dependent Southern society as a whole was on the planter aristocracy, I suspect a few thousand hanged slavers might’ve been enough to break their ability to organize against Reconstruction, at least long enough for it to take root.

We had such progress in the Reconstruction years, even with literal guerilla bands of racists fight against it. It makes a man want to cry to think about how near-run a thing it was. How much better race relations in this country would have been through the 20th century… how many lives saved, from death, from ruin, from pointless persecution…