I'd say it was moreso the concessions of things like letting racist piles of shit back into congress almost as soon as the war was over. If they had been treated like the untrustworthy shitstains that they clearly are, maybe they'd have eventually learned to appreciate why bigotry is bad. They should've had to earn equal rights. By willingly extending those rights to minorities before they themselves gained equal political rights.

Instead, we got decades and decades of Jim Crow/etc...

One day, will be have the same appreciation about Luigi?

The confederates should have lost everything. We probably would have had to occupy the south for decades and have routine public executions of klansmen, and there wasn't an appetite for that for various reasons.

Very good points. The perpetual cowardice of americans will never cease to amaze me. It is not a moral high ground to fail to put down a beast of the sort that is institutionalized racism and bigotry.

If we'd even just had 4 years of Hannibal Hamlin + 8 years of Grant, I feel like we'd be in a less fucked position.

Maybe after the war.

Probably not. John Brown had much more of a plan and an ideological goal (abolition of slavery via literal mass slave revolt) with his killing. Luigi was more like any number of people who lost family to shithead war criminals, and went vigilante on their war criminal ass afterwards. A thumbs-up, but not really game-changing.

Why isn’t there a John Brown movie?

There is THE GOOD LORD BIRD. Maybe he's just too much to contain in a 2 hour runtime.

Why don't we make one? I've got a super 8 camera somewhere that's way more fun to use than my phone. Plus, film > digital

I dunno. I've been fighting my physicians for years about my healthcare. Someone fires a few bullets somewhere, they blame Luigi for it, and the next month I'm suddenly able to make progress with my healthcare plan. Like, legitimate measurable progress happens because of the change they finally let me make that one month. Now i know I'm an outlier in some things, but I'm pretty sure not that.

I'm not saying that he didn't have any influence in bettering society! Just that there is a vast gulf in what the two men did, and what they set out to do.

"I shot a shithead in the hopes of discouraging other shitheads from being shitheads" if successful, is a positive - including in shaking up some potential shitheads into being less shitty for a time. But it doesn't change the game itself.

"I massacred slaver supporters during contested elections in the hopes of overthrowing a fraudulent state government (eventually successfully), and then I tried to raise an army to end slavery in the USA forever" is a game-changer, or at least an attempt at it!