Modeling reconstruction as a wargame, 1865-1877.

The destruction and social upheaval of the U.S. Civil War did not end with the laying down of arms at Appomattox, but instead continued for the next 11 years, a period known as Reconstruction, as Americans of different classes, backgrounds, and origins struggled to achieve competing visions of what a more perfect union would look like. For many Northerners, this meant the increased economic integration of the South into the North. For the Planter-class of the former Confederacy, this took the form a return to slavery by other means. Between these two forces stood the Freedmen; men and women who had retaken their freedom through force, and sought to establish for themselves a future in the only home most of them had ever known. Of these three visions, the Jim Crow future engineered by Southern elites would come to dominate not only the rebel states of the Confederacy, but would affect the culture of the United States as a whole, laying the groundwork for both the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s and the racial inequalities that continue to afflict our nation today. This simulation, and the paper that accompanies it, seeks not to explain why one man would choose to subjugate another, but to show how, by raising the cost of Reconstruction and occupation beyond what the North was willing to pay, the strategic goals the Confederacy was unable to achieve by force of arms, their decedents were able to take through patience, economics, culture, and terror. This thesis tells the story of counterinsurgencies and asymmetric wars: a disenfranchised elite, a newly empowered ethnic group, an occupying military power, and the violence and chaos of economic upheaval. By modeling the chaos and asymmetry of the Reconstruction era as a four-player wargame, this game will allow players to understand the decisions, resources, and constraints of major factions following the end of the Civil War, and encourage them to both understand the context of America's historical execution of asym