But the point of these trials and executions for treason is that supposedly they would impress upon the Southerners how wrong they were. That just isn’t realistic. It wouldn’t convince the South that they were wrong any more than the South’s counter-arguments would convince the Union that they weren’t. This isn’t a viable “hearts and minds” strategy.
We clearly disagree on the debate-ability of comparing the Nazis to the Confederacy; you consider it debatable, I do not. I agree with you on the legality that leaders and officers in the Confederacy committed treason, and that death was a prescribe punishment for treason. I’m not convinced that this would have been for the betterment of the country as a whole, but what I find to be the biggest flaw in your argument is the idea that this would have resulted in better race relations today. As I noted, the war was not fought by the North with the goal of ‘purging the ideology of slavery’, the goal was the preservation of the Union. Lincoln himself wrote just that, and that if he could save the Union without freeing any slaves that he would do it.
Race relations were much more complex than the South were racists who kept blacks as slaves and the North didn’t, and therefore race problems were caused by the South and slavery. Abolitionists who believed in actual equality of the races as opposed to simply finding the institution of slavery abhorrent while viewing blacks to be an ‘inferior’ race were few and far between, and again the abolishment of slavery wasn’t the goal of the Union in the war. The New York Draft Riots “remain the largest civil and most racially charged urban disturbance in American history.”
Initially intended to express anger at the draft, the protests turned into a race riot, with white rioters attacking black people, in violence throughout the city. The official death toll was listed at either 119 or 120 individuals. Conditions in the city were such that Major General John E. Wool, commander of the Department of the East, said on July 16 that “Martial law ought to be proclaimed, but I have not a sufficient force to enforce it.”
Just to note the go-to example of how potentially protracted and brutal an extended guerilla war could be even in that day and age, the Paraguayan War or the War of the Triple Alliance took place from 1864-70 and ended only after a lengthy guerilla war and the death of Solano López. It was reported at the time that 90% of the male population of Paraguay died in the war, but more recent scholarship puts the death rate at ‘only’ over 60% of the Paraguayan population.
Yes, you most definitely are saying that.
What you refuse to take under consideration is that as soon as you propose a changing point in history, the resulting world may be either improved or degraded. Only a love for your own ideas can make anyone declare that one would occur rather than the other.
At most others can look at your scenario and come to their own conclusions. People here do not seem to be in as much love with your idea. Perhaps that’s because you’re trying to solve today’s problems by imposing a solution on another world that just skips the 150 years in between. Or perhaps because your solution seems to ignore everything we know and understand about the entire 19th century. Alt-history has to stand on a firm base or it’s just another What If comic book.
So, lets say that my county decides to succeed from the country. We make a bunch of declarations and speeches to the effect, then open fire on the local police department.
After our rebellion is put down, do you think the leaders should escape punishment because they insist that they were an independent sovereign nation that had declared war against a foreign power attempting to conquer and occupy their country?
How many statues do you think they deserve?
This is where I see the main flaw as well. For years after the war, Southerners continued to believe slavery was perfectly okay and they were morally on the right side of history. Executing some Confederate politicians and military officers wouldn’t have changed those beliefs. I expect such actions would have led to continued guerrilla warfare against Union forces for quite a while.
What we needed to do was to end the war. We didn’t. We still haven’t. We’re still fighting the same war a century and a half later. Nothing would have changed the minds of the traitors alive at the time, but we could at least have removed them from power, so they couldn’t keep their ideas alive into the next generations.
I think that’s the entire point of the thread, the argument that such actions would have improved things. You can argue that they wouldn’t but you are instead arguing against even asking the question.
I don’t think that the OP has a time machine ready to go and make this change if we come to a consensus. However, I think the point is more to learn from the mistakes of history, and if it felt that the way the south was treated post war was a mistake, what we can learn from that to deal with analogous contemporary and future events.
“Should” doesn’t enter into it. As a practical result the winners would in this case punish the losers. My point has been, what audience are you playing to here? The OP postulates that a program of “de-Confederatization” post-Civil War would have discredited the Confederacy and its agenda. In the eyes of the North sure, where such discrediting wasn’t needed anyway. In the eyes of the South, doubtful. The stubborn pride and the almost delusional hubris of the southern Cause would not go down that easily.
Are your saying that the problem wasn’t that the leaders were racists who wanted to enslave other humans, and that using them as an example wouldn’t have helped? But that the entire population were racists who wanted to enslave other humans, and no matter what was done, they would remain so?
What would your suggestion be then? Assuming that your goal is to no longer have a bunch of racists that want to enslave other people.
Pretty much, yes. Or at least, I don’t think the humiliation of seeing their proud leaders disgraced and executed would have cowed them much if at all. ETA: that might have been different if what some Northern propagandists at the time claimed had really been true- that a handful of pro-slavery “fire-eaters” had supposedly led the South into rebellion ala’ the Pied Piper. But the historical evidence is that with the exception of a handful of pro-Union enclaves, secession was wildly popular in the South.
Huh, I actually have more respect for the average 1860’s southerner than you do, I guess. But, you could be right that they were all just a bunch of monsters that would stop at nothing in their quest to own other humans.
Anyway, if you could get ahold of the OP’s time changing machine, would you prevent the trials and executions of Nazi leaders?
ETA to your ETA: I don’t know that it was entirely northern propaganda at fault here. Most southerners couldn’t afford to make their dream of owning other humans a reality, and it was only a handful of pro-slavery actors who stood to benefit from it. If the south was harmed by propaganda, it was the propaganda that if they won the “war of northern aggression” then one day, they too could own their own human.
Here’s something rather disturbing to consider: the people of the antebellum South had a society, customs and morality so different from ours as to seem almost the product of an alien extraterrestrial civilization. They really believed that they were right, and that it was self-evident to any person who wasn’t a villain or a monster that they were right. They had perhaps literally the same mindset as feudal lords: they loved war, considered manual labor degradation, and saw themselves ordained of God as the natural masters of the lessers who toiled for them.
Slavery is another matter - the most vicious habit humans fall into and the hardest to break… After a culture falls ill of it, it gets rooted in the economic system and laws, in men’s habits and attitudes. You abolish it; you drive it underground - there it lurks, ready to spring up again, in the minds of people who think it is their ‘natural’ right to own other people. You can’t reason with them; you can kill them but you can’t change their minds.
Robert A. Heinlein
Citizen of the Galaxy
Oh, in response to the question about the Nazis: I really wish the Nuremburg trials had been conducted on firmer legal grounds. The Nazis set a standard for reprehensibility that hadn’t been seen in modern times; but the trials smacked of victor’s justice and post ex facto law.
That goes a bit further than the OP, I think, in that you seem to be saying that it wouldn’t be enough to try and execute the leaders, but that we’d need to kill everyone.
Heinlein was a good sci-fi writer and told some fun stories, but virtually everything he has had to say about history, psychology, or politics were poorly reasoned analysis of outdated pop-culture.
True, but I’m also not convinced that the Nuremberg Trials and the subsequent executions were the reason that happened either. That’s essentially the historical parallel you’re trying to draw here.
And I think it’s absolutely absurd to think the country would be less racist today as a result. That racism was ingrained into the people and the society themselves; it wasn’t some sort of top-down thing promulgated by the leadership of the time.
Also, the post-war politicians were generally NOT the wartime or pre-war leadership. The vast majority of former Confederate officers went on to spectacularly mundane careers as stuff like postmasters of small towns, small time businessmen, etc…
It’s unfair and absurd to think that the people of the time (a harsher and more violent time at that) didn’t know what they were doing when they called for reconciliation instead of some kind of reckoning.
The difference between Nuremberg and the Nazis vs the US South is obvious.
Pre-1933 most Germans were not believers in Nazi ideology. In 1945 most were willing to return to their pre-existing non-Nazi ideology, and especially so when rewarded by the Allies via the Marshall Plan for doing so. What happened at Nuremberg and the resulting executions was a largely irrelevant sideshow to how the rest of the defeat, occupation, and subsequent rebuilding affected each and every individual German.
Pre-1864 most Southerners, and certainly the slave-owning ones, were totally steeped in a white supremacist worldview. Once defeated in 1868 they had no other non-racist ideology to return to. So by and large, amidst the wreckage of war, the loss of their slaves, and the inadequacy of Reconstruction, they simply thought and behaved as they had for the previous 5 generations, while nursing an ever-growing grudge against what was done to their way of life.
In that latter environment, whether the North executed a handful, or a hundred, of the South’s leading lights would have mattered little. And what little it did matter would trigger reactionary anger, not contrition, in the defeated Southerners.
The right answer for the Civil war was for the North to say at the outset
Sayonara and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out; you’ve been more trouble than you were worth since the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. Any American, black or white, wishing to migrate north will be welcomed.
The the North could have driven forward into the future while the South became a backwards economically useless failed state. Or else learned its lesson and joined the march of historical progress voluntarily 50 or 100 chastened years later.
Not even incrementally? Do you think it would be a hot button issue that we are renaming bases to remove the names of Confederate leaders in 2023 if they had been branded traitors in the late 1860s?
As it should be.
Instead of facing Justice for their crimes.
Lee became president of Washington (later Washington and Lee University).
Jeff Davis traveled Europe for a few years before getting a job at an insurance company.
Beauregard became the president of a railroad before become supervisor of the Louisiana lottery.
Joseph Johnston became a railroad and insurance executive before going into congress and the Cleveland administration.
James Longstreet became a partner in a cotton brokerage in New Orleans and the president of an insurance company. Then he decided to become a Republican and ended up getting appointments in Grant’s administration.
They didn’t go live under a rock. They didn’t tend a simple farm until the end of their days. They became rich. They suffered no consequences.
And it set a precedent for the future of the south, which has continued to reject the results of the war ever since.
I hear the pushback about resentment and guerrilla warfare. What do you think the Klan represented? What do you think public lynchings, where post cards and even body parts were sold as souvenirs, symbolized? It sounds like you are warning me of a history that already exists.
One of the biggest reasons WHY Lee, specifically, is still so revered is a reason that you and people like you are strangely reluctant to admit – to wit, that there are large and highly significant parallels between him and George Washington. If history had turned just slightly differently at any number of inflection points, it would have been Washington who we would be damming as a slave-owning traitor to his country.
With just a bit of care, I could draw up a description that would render you genuinely unable to determine which of the two I was describing.
I agree with you.
I have no doubt.
But does the United States have a constitutional clause against treason or not?
I mean, I actually indeed prefer @LSLGuy ’s solution to let the south secede. I agree that it would have probably floundered as a nation state (and might have broken into its own factions, or been invaded later), but the United States would have been just fine without it.
But if we take the position that it is unlawful for Americans to commit treason, then I don’t see why we should give somebody like Lee a pass.
Yes, George Washington would have been likely brought to London, put on trial, and executed for his crimes, but he didn’t lose. Robert E Lee did. Are you saying America should revere him as the father of his country?
Again, I feel you are ascribing results to the war that were never there. It wasn’t fought to improve race relations or to purge the ideology of slavery. It was fought to preserve the Union, a result which the South hasn’t rejected ever since. During the course of the war it became expedient for the North to abolish slavery (and notably initially only in states in rebellion, not in states that had stayed loyal to the Union), and again the South hasn’t rejected that result ever since. Yes, there were Jim Crow laws, but there was never again open slavery, nor has anyone meaningful in the South called for the rejection of the abolition of slavery.
This in particular out of the names you listed shows the complexity of sentiment in the country post-war. Grant fought against Longstreet on the battlefield, and just after the war:
On June 7, 1865, Lee, Longstreet, and other former Confederate officers were indicted by a grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia for the high crime of treason against the United States, a capital offense punished by imprisonment and hanging. When informed, Grant objected and went to the White House, telling President Andrew Johnson that the men were on parole and protected by the surrender terms at Appomattox. When an angered Grant threatened to resign, Johnson backed down, and on June 20, Attorney General James Speed ordered the United States Attorney General in Norfolk to drop treason proceedings against the former Confederate officers, saving Longstreet from punishment and prosecution.