That’s what makes the premise so intriguing to me. It seems self-evident that the resolution of the conflict permitted the traitors an “honorable” off ramp. “We fought the good fight, for a just cause. The tragedy is that we lost.” The Confederate leadership was still venerated.
I think it’s important, as Moriarty asserts, that the losers of an unjust war of aggression need to pay a price beyond simply losing. Yes, like the Nazis. Not for vengeance, but for justice and the message that it sends to future generations. The aftermath, whatever it is, should make their disgrace and dishonor real and apparent, and the idea of the losers having military bases and high schools named after them unthinkable.
Did you miss the part where I proposed pardoning all of the enlisted soldiers? I’m only talking about prosecuting the top leaders - generals, other top officers and elected officials. Mercy can be reserved for the more common man.
“On April 9, 1865, the Confederate Army surrendered at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia. (Joshua) Chamberlain was there as the details were sorted out over the next few days. He had plenty of reason to hate the rebels after fighting them for so long but in that moment, as they were marching past him in defeat, Chamberlain ordered his troops to salute them—as fellow soldiers and fellow Americans.”
“The situation we’re looking at today, you can see those parallels, and if we do not come together, if we do not maintain our standards of decency with one another, what does that mean for us as a nation? What does that say for us as a human species?” Larissa Vigue of the Pejepscot History Center said. “I think we need to look back to leaders like Chamberlain who chose the high road, so to speak, instead of the low road.”
Some posters in this thread evidently would be happier if Chamberlain had ordered his troops to fire into the ranks of defeated Confederate soldiers - but only at the officers, of course.
And what did that get us? A century and a half later we still have people in this country who take pride in the fact that their ancestors waged war on the United States.
Where was the reckoning?
The OP I wrote described the legal process by which people would be prosecuted, in accordance with the standard set by United States Constitution.
Who are you talking about who would have lobbied for shooting at people who were marching?
Executing the leadership of the Confederacy would have been such a bad idea that even at the time no one seriously contemplated it. The whole political theory that the North had fought for was that Southerners were fellow citizens, (ETA), that the North demanded nothing of them except allegiance, and most especially that the war was NOT an abolitionist crusade. While certainly by all legal tradition the Union would have been within its authority to execute former rebels, politically the Union desperately needed reconciliation and a return to normalcy as quickly as was feasible. A punitive binge of drumhead trials and executions would have undermined this.
Consider that after the war the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a monument to Henry Wirz, the commandant of the infamous Andersonville p.o.w. camp, one of only two people executed by the Union for war crimes. The UDC declared that Wirz had been “judicially murdered”; and Wirz’s gravestone identifies him as “a Confederate Hero-Martyr”. Far from extinguishing the flames of the Lost Cause, a purge of former Confederates would have cemented it indefinitely.
Also, it’s simply not true that Southerners were the sole principals behind racism. Pre-Civil War, blacks had been second-class citizens in all the free states of the North. Some northern states had actually attempted to forbid free blacks from settling in those states. Despite the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (because it was politically useful to Reconstruction to enfranchise the former slaves), northern whites were as prone to racism as any, as witnessed during the Anti-Draft riots of 1864. Decades after the war when southern blacks began moving north in the Great Migration, populist movements in the north embraced racism in segregation and discrimination.
So no, the ancient idea that social reform can be accomplished by killing all the regressives wouldn’t have worked in this instance either.
And yet he remains an obscure figure in American culture; his name would make for a good trivia answer.
Whereas men like Robert E Lee are lionized in our society. Anybody with a passing knowledge of American history knows his name, probably would recognize his face, and would have heard the story that he was a “good” man who was a “brilliant” general who remained “loyal” to his home state of Virginia. We named a university after him, to say nothing of scores of local monuments and schools.
Fuck that.
The man was a brutal, slave owning tyrant who was personally responsible for directing the deaths of thousands (if not millions) of Americans.
Let fringe groups revere him. As a nation, we’d be better off if those who did so were cast out of decent society 170 years ago.
Would there still be bigotry, racism, and resentment? Yes, I concede that. The KKK would still exist, in my opinion.
But, in comparison to the mainstream acceptance of the confederate legacy that we have today (which, in my opinion, includes this notion that one’s feelings about facts dictate which ones people choose to believe), our society would be far better off - I don’t think the mainstream ignorance of the modern GOP, for example, is as sustainable when we don’t allow a counter factual myth like the glory of the Confederacy to exist.
Civil rights would have still been a struggle, too. But I think that a concrete example of federal government enforcement of treason adds more teeth to the US’ later enforcement of civil rights. There’s a precedent set - the south will have to capitulate to changes in the law, or else the government will follow through on punishing those who resist.
Instead of being forced to do so under possible threat of death, what did the United States bring to bear? Not much, it turned out, and so we dealt with legal segregation for another century, and continued inequality ever since.
Again, I’m not saying that this one simple change to history would have completely changed things, but I do think it would have improved our trajectory.
You misunderstand my point. I’m not saying we kill anybody today.
I’m saying that if the leaders of the confederacy had been properly prosecuted and punished for their crimes, then the lies that are told today would not be sustainable, except amongst the fringes of society.
Stated another way, the myth of the glorious lost cause wouldn’t be plausible if the undeniable truth of history is that they committed treason against the United States, and were punished for their crime.
Except that the whole dispute was over whether secession was treason- the South insisted that it wasn’t. Hanging the defeated Confederates would have proved nothing except that the winners get to write the history books.
I haven’t been able to find the cite but someone wrote an alternate-history short story in which Abraham Lincoln was killed by a sniper’s bullet at Fort Stevens in 1864. As a result of this, the Union pursues a vindictive policy of reducing the rebel states to conquered provinces whose white inhabitants have no rights and live under perpetual military occupation. As late as the 1940s southern would-be rebels are aligning themselves with Nazi Germany in an attempt to throw off the Yankee yoke.
Except that the South insisted that they were an independent sovereign nation that had declared war against a foreign power attempting to conquer and occupy their country. This gets into debates as silly as whether the vessel that fought the Monitor was properly called the Merrimac or the Virginia. My point is simply that the South would never, ever have accepted that what they did was treason, and no amount of grinding their face in the dust could have made them.
As an American, it’s a bit of a mystery to me as well. Except that race relations continues to be a problem in this country.
Also there are people who benefit from the American “culture war”. Namely politicians, media companies, and the super-wealthy who are able to leverage Americans pointlessly bickering over this kind of stuff to build and consolidate political and economic power.
It may be fun to posit alternative histories, but I feel like America’s leaders did the best they could, given the circumstances, to keep the Unites States together as a cohesive country. It may not seem that way watching 24 hour news or reading through internet discussions with people of no importance, but a person can freely move around, work, and live pretty much anywhere in the USA they want to (and can afford).
Why? Wouldn’t the same racists be talking about their support for the Confederacy and how great it was? The only difference would be they would be pointing to the executions as proof that the American government was the bad guys after the Civil War.
Have you ever seen any movement that was discredited by having martyrs? People might not want to be killed themselves but they’re always happy to point to other people who died for their cause. So killing people back in 1865 would not be suppressing neo-confederates in 2023; it would have the opposite effect.
Similar stories are “A Just and Lasting Peace” by Lois Tilton and “The Lincoln Train” by Maureen McHugh but the circumstances of Lincoln’s death in those stories differ. All of them are based on the idea of there being a harsher retribution after the war’s end with ongoing hostility decades later.
That is as much a defense to treason as saying “Sure, I shot and killed the guy in cold blood after injecting him with tranquilizers. But he’s an asshole, and I really don’t like his stupid face, so I didn’t think it was murder.”
Whether or not secession was legally effective (it wasn’t, and for what it’s worth the South didn’t act like it was after the Civil War either) isn’t just some “silly debate,” it is the central issue. It’s why what confederate rebels like Lee did was treason whether or not they thought it was treason.
Mistake of law is not, in general, a defense, unless an element of the offense includes knowing violation. So it’s a defense to certain tax crimes, for example (which, to be clear, does not relieve one of one’s tax burden, it merely provides a limited defense for certain good faith errors), but it’s no defense at all to treason or just about any other crime.
