Radical Republicans proposed seizing Confederate land for freedpeople as retribution

Evidence

There was also the promise that after generations of working land they could never own, the formerly enslaved would be compensated. During the war, the Union army had torn through the South and seized a bountiful amount of farmland and property owned by Confederate families. A contingent of so-called Radical Republicans in Congress, led by Thaddeus Stevens, argued that the seized land should be handed over to the formerly enslaved. It would be a form of poetic justice, but also retribution. They figured the redistribution of land would effectively break the back of the traitorous Southern aristocracy. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 896

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s prior article on sacrifice as stabilizer of stratified societies - land redistribution as a structural blow to an aristocracy, the inverse of sacrificial kinship.
• SEED: The 40-acres-and-a-mule promise as a counterfactual origin story - the US dates itself from a redistribution that never happened, which is itself an infrastructure choice.