I live in the Southern United States and I’m insulted that the Union allowed former Confederates to resurrect much of the apartheid state that led to the Civil War in the first place. There is a vast, enormous difference between reconciliation and capitulation.
Executing them may have been a bit too harsh. Sure, disarm them and send them peacefully back to their farmer’s life (with appropriate punishment for war atrocities), but mass executions weren’t called for.
But it was absolutely wrong and inappropriate to elevate turncoat Confederates such as Col. Lee to the same status as American heroes, to litter the countryside with monuments to them. It’s an outrage that any American military bases were named after traitors, and it’s long past time to expunge their names. Confederates weren’t heroes. They were traitors. They were bad American citizens, and most never really repented or redeemed themselves.
Why revisit this now? You don’t need to look much to see the problems that are created by people’s confusion over what the war was about, and who actually won it.
True enough. For starters, they could have stuck hard and fast to section 3 of the 14th amendment (along with all the others):
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Instead they copped out and passed the Amnesty Act of 1872.
Yeah, with the leadership it should have been a matter of “you can go back to private life, but for these actions you must forfeit your political franchise and the holding any position of public trust”. The thing is, they would have probably said “ok, fair enough”.
But let’s face it, it soon became a “reconciliation” between the South’s White Establishment and the North’s White Establishment for the sake of political expediency, and that involved looking the other way as the supremacist society reasserted itself and imposed being portrayed as noble and respected.
The real basic component of division that continued existing and that is a threat even today is that a significant part of this nation holds on to a worldview that there is an order in which everyone has their place, and everyone must know their place and stay in their place, and any questioning thereof is a personal affront that must not be allowed to stand because if they rise means I am diminished. As mentioned earlier the South historically suffered from the blight that is “honor culture” whereby you must never be seen as backing down or admitting being in the wrong unless it is literally beat out of you, else your manhood is lessened, and never mind doing so in the face of someone who is your lesser.
So, uh, where are we on the question of whether executing Confederate leaders would have led to a less divisive now? I haven’t seen any particularly convincing evidence that executions would have change the hearts and minds of Southerners. When I was a graduate student, I was never that interested in the Civil War, but more interested in the historiography of the war and how it’s part of some people’s identity. When I worked at a museum, it was the Lost Cause nuts who were the most passionate about Civil War history, but it’s nice to see other people have some passion about history.
Does anyone really think executing Confederate leaders would have helped? Or is this more about your anger over current events?
If they had executed Nathan B Forrest, who certainly committed war crimes, there never would have been a KKK.
So, maybe not as many reprisal lynchings as many of you think. Not to mention, it would have to be done while the Union Army was still occupying, so again, less lynchings.
But if we just hung the one that committed war crimes, that would have been a Good Idea.
They lost.
No, because then all sorts of states- in the North and the South would secede anytime they didnt like something.
And the South had no grounds for seceding anyway. No one was gonna take their slaves away… at least for their lifetimes.
Exactly. Note that the CSA constitution did not allow for secession. It was nor mentioned, iirc.
This is simply not true. Several states had laws protecting women’s right to property. Single women and widows especially. Married women had less rights, The Legal Status of Women, 1776–1830 | AP US History Study Guide from The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. n every state, the legal status of free women depended upon marital status. Unmarried women, including widows, were called “femes soles,” or “women alone.” They had the legal right to live where they pleased and to support themselves in any occupation that did not require a license or a college degree restricted to males. Single women could enter into contracts, buy and sell real estate, or accumulate personal property, which was called personalty . It consisted of everything that could be moved—cash, stocks and bonds, livestock, and, in the South, slaves. So long as they remained unmarried, women could sue and be sued, write wills, serve as guardians, and act as executors of estates. These rights were a continuation of the colonial legal tradition. But the revolutionary emphasis on equality brought some important changes in women’s inheritance rights. State lawmakers everywhere abolished primogeniture and the tradition of double shares of a parent’s estate, inheritance customs that favored the eldest son. Instead, equal inheritance for all children became the rule—a big gain for daughters.
Not true. “Even though it excluded areas not in rebellion, it still applied to more than 3.5 million of the 4 million enslaved people in the country. Around 25,000 to 75,000 were immediately emancipated in those regions of the Confederacy where the US Army was already in place.”
Treason is a political crime. I have no hesitation in saying the Confederates were wrong. But people shouldn’t be executed for believing the wrong politics.
That mirrored the position in English common law, that everything a married woman possessed became the property of her husband (until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882) .
Post-WWII Germany and post-Civil War South are not really comparable. Germany was not at war with itself, before or after the war. The US was, and still is. The differences between the South and the North were not in fact so clear-cut either then or now. Plantation/industrial black slavery might have been the basis of the Southern economy but racism is and was the true basis of the class system throughout the US. The North was claiming a high ground it never had much right to.
The reason we didn’t hang Civil War traitors is because they did not feel like strangers, enemies. More like feuding family members. Which they still do.
Violence, including governmental violence like public executions, only hardens beliefs. It doesn’t open people to new perspectives. So, no, I don’t think the OP has a case.
I do think that following up on Reconstruction, and rebuilding the Southern economy on a more egalitarian basis, would have had a much better effect, but that would have faced the ever-stronger headwind of racism that doomed it historically, so would it have been successful if just a few more events had gone a different way? John Wilkes Booth’s gun jammed?
The thing is, though, that most of the people you’d have been stringing up weren’t the one who led the Lost Cause movement. Robert E. Lee didn’t do any of that shit; he took a quiet little job and spent what few years he had left refusing to badmouth the USA or its leaders. They would have had to hang tens of thousands of people, maybe more, and would have had to be able to predict the future to know who was going to be the worst asshole in the post-reconstruction.
Are you really comparing the legally sound execution of men who took up arms against the United States for one the vilest cause imaginable and murdered American soldiers and civilians - just like Al Qaeda or ISIS - to black men who were innocent or guily of minor crimes and were lynched? You understand that lynchings are simple murders and are fully extrajudicial and illegal (when the judges aren’t corrupt and racist and do their job, of course)… right?
Armed rebellion isn’t legal, and treason explicitly IS a capital crime. No one would be executed for holding slaves, so the fact that it was legal is completely irrelevant.
If you storm the capitol in opposition to a new law banning fast food chains from selling extra large sodas and get killed by security, that doesn’t mean that the government killed you for drinking too much soda…
You think that letting Lee literally “die for the sins” of the South would make him a figure LESS worshipped? Give it 2 generations and Southerners would let Lee replace Jesus.
You reject his laughable terms, fight a few more weeks, and see if Lee (or his men) changes his mind.
It’s funny how, for all their alleged gallantry, the Confederate “heroes” were so concerned with saving their own skins, but were fine sacrificing their men.
In fact, the Nazis thought the Confederacy was awesome, and Hitler wrote a bunch in Mein Kampf about how wonderful the South was and how brilliant Jim Crow laws were. He modeled many of the methods he used to discriminate against Jews on American laws about Blacks.
Treason… is waging war against the United States (yes, yes, or giving aid/comfort to its enemies, but we’re talking about the Civil War here). That’s not a political crime. Or at least not merely a political crime. In fact, it is because the founders didn’t want treason to be used for mere political differences (as it was liable to be under monarchy) that they had it codified in the Constitution, and narrowed it specifically to treason in relation to war.
And if you think an insurrection that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans (with one side fighting for the right to keep human beings as property) is merely political, as opposed to murder and human trafficking on a large scale, and any repercussions against rebel leaders would have been for “believing the wrong politics” and nothing more, I guess I don’t know what else to say.
Is that really how you see it? If so, you might just encapsulate perfectly why the nation may have been better served by at least putting the rebel leaders on trial: to better detail the extent of the violence they presided over and meted out against their fellow Americans of all races, to make clear that their crimes went far beyond merely “believing the wrong politics.”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy follow a hateful, disgusting, white supremacist ideology. Why should we concern ourselves with who they build monuments for? Are you also worried about who the Taliban builds monuments for?
This is all true, and relevant to answer the followup question, “If executing the Confederate traitorous leadership would have had so many benefits and made sense legally and historically, why wasn’t it done?”. It’s an answer to why the North failed to do the right thing. But it doesn’t impact what the right thing to do would be.
I certainly think some other “enterprising” southern “gentlemen” would have founded a similar organization. The desire to go out and do what the KKK does clearly existed.
As the thriving Jim Crow culture postbellum showed, the apartheid state wasn’t what led to rebellion. It was the political struggle specifically over slavery itself- its expansion or potential abolition. The Thirteenth Amendment was indispensable because it destroyed the secessionists’ cause célèbre. As has been pointed out, whites north and south were fine with apartheid.
Post-bellum the southern half of the country did consider Confederate generals to be brave heroes. Non-southerners could have been rather more disapproving of lionizing Confederate generals, but conceded that they had been American military men of some note. On the other hand, for over a century there was such opposition to recognizing the legitimacy of the Confederacy that history books ignored that the ship referred to as the Merrimac had actually sailed as the CSS Virginia.
Again, beating the south over the head with how wrong and evil their Confederate leaders were would have been mere virtue signaling that accomplished precisely zero. FWIW, there were very few tributes to Confederate leaders outside the south.
BTW: although they didn’t dare actually name him, someone actually put up a monument to Benedict Arnold for his service in the Battles of Saratoga: Boot Monument - Wikipedia