The North bent over backwards to avoid portraying the war as a crusade for abolition. Which is why we got the society that whites north and south largely wanted until after World War Two. Essentially the debate in this thread is that the Radical Republicans of the time were right, and that the war and Reconstruction should have been a crusade for racial equality. But they were in the minority and so a purely pragmatic course of reunification, at blacks’ expense, was what we got.
I know you read the whole post because you also quoted my closing argument in the next post, but No, I didn’t think it would make him LESS worshipped. I did specify the execution would have to be done after appropriate public contrition (italics in my original post) and that:
So no, I absolutely feel that the mythification was going to be a given, just that for the sake of the hypothetical it could, however unlikely, have served as a better version of the lost cause. And, given how modern Christian Nationalists build a theory of national domination far removed from any imaginable relation to the actual material about Jesus (not saying that he’s a historical figure in any sense), I of course fully acknowledge it would likely be doomed anyway.
ETA - This was not meant to slam @Babale about not reading my post, as I said they fully acknowledged my statement of why I felt it doomed anyway in the very next post, but wanted to point out that I fully recognized it was a weak shot at best, and I added plenty of qualifiers. Just felt the thread was getting too one sided when I originally posted.
Your argument seems to be over two different issues; slavery and warfare.
Slavery is wrong. I certainly agree it is wrong. But we shouldn’t project our awareness of this back to 1865. Slavery was legal in the United States, even as late as 1865. So to declare in 1866 that people should be executed for supporting or even practicing slavery in 1865 would have been wrong. It would be the equivalent of enacting a law that retroactively called for the execution of any woman who had received an abortion between 1972 and 2023.
Warfare is also a terrible thing, although I’m not sure I’d go as far as to call it wrong. But warfare is not generally recognized as a criminal act. People are killed and property is destroyed in wars and the troops who do that killing and destroying are not charged as criminals. Do you feel it should be otherwise? Should we have executed British soldiers after the Revolution and the War of 1812 for the American soldiers who they killed? Or executed German and Japanese soldiers after WWII because they killed American soldiers? That obviously is not what happened. So I don’t see why we should have executed Confederate soldiers for killing American soldiers after the Civil War.
I want to again note what I have said in previous posts; I agree that people should have been tried and executed for war crimes. But not for regular acts of war.
well said.
It is when it’s against your own country (and honestly, maybe it should be in general).
If executing the leaders put an end to a movement, we wouldn’t be having problems with Christian conservatives.
Do you have a source for this apart from an uncited statement that I had to look up as coming from wiki? Because this, cited in the post you are responding to:
Despite this expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the United States, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy (the Southern secessionist states) that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union (United States) military victory.
Is directly from the National Archives, bolding added by me.
Those people decided that the United States wasn’t their country and formed their own separate country. You have said this isn’t a political issue. How do you define people deciding their allegiance is to a different country if you feel that isn’t a political decision?
That’s a common error. The Emancipation Proclamation declared that any slave whose owner resided in the rebellious area was freed.
Obviously the slaves who were still living with their owners in those rebellious areas were not practically freed by the proclamation; the American forces had no ability to enforce the proclamation at the time it went into effect.
But one of the things that prompted the proclamation was the growing number of slaves who were running away from their owners in rebellious areas and seeking the protection of areas controlled by the American military. The Emancipation Proclamation applied to all of these runaways and immediately freed them on the day it went into effect.
I’d only add the caveat that the Radical Republicans were founded prior to the Civil War around the abolition of slavery and during reconstruction were in favor of much harsher treatment of the South; it doesn’t necessarily follow that favoring abolition meant believing in racial equality, especially as we understand the term today.
Except they didn’t. They never left the United States of America, nor could they have ever done so unilaterally. But maybe you’re right. Maybe treason is “too political.” So how about we just call it murder instead, no different than when a sovereign citizen nut job announces they are no longer subject to the nation’s laws and responds by murdering a police officer?
The people in the CSA believed they had left the United States and formed a separate nation. The people in the USA believed that the Confederates were still part of the United States. I call that a difference of political beliefs.
As for charging Confederate soldiers for murder, will you answer my previous question; do you also think Japanese and German soldiers should have been charged for murder in 1945?
The law recognizes a difference between a soldier being killed during wartime by an enemy soldier and a police officer being killed by a sovereign citizen nut job. If you deny this distinction then why limit the charges to Confederate leaders? Shouldn’t the enlisted men who were committing “murder” be charged for their crimes? Even the ones who didn’t actually kill an American soldier were presumably guilty of attempted murder or being an accessory to murder. If you feel acts of war qualify as murder, then we should have executed every Confederate veteran.
Wow! I had no idea that Germany and Japan were US states before they rebelled in WW2, or that Hitler and Hirohito were traitorous American citizens! Ignorance fought, I guess.
The law, unlike your post, also recognizes the difference between a foreign soldier and a treasonous rebel:
18 U.S.C. § 2381 says, “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or imprisoned and fined, and incapable of holding any U.S. office.”
But they hadn’t. Full stop. That’s what made it treason for them to wage war against the US, and indeed their own citizens within the self-purportedly-seceding states, to the extent those citizens remained loyal to the Union.*
As I said before, a mistaken but genuine belief that one has left the Union and so no longer owes allegiance to the US is no more a defense to treason than a mistaken but genuine belief that one’s victim is a real asshole is a defense to murder.
How could it be any other way?
What would be the utility of a law against treason if it could be so easily bypassed merely by claiming “Well, yeah, but I don’t consider myself an American anymore”?
*And I want to be very clear on this: secession resulted in not only violence against federal troops, but American citizens within seceding states who expressed unionist sympathies. Their rights, as Americans, were infringed by the usurpation of supreme authority by state governments and/or the Confederate government acting in furtherance of the unlawful and unconstitutional cause of secession, contrary to the supremacy clause of the US Constitution, to which all states were bound upon ratification, and until such time as an amendment might permit their departure from the Union.
The fundamental error here is thinking that the cause of divisiveness today has roots in the civil war and slavery, rather than the philosophical and policy differences between right and left today.
Canada is pretty freaking divided, and we didn’t have slavery. The EU seems to be coming apart, and it’s not over slavery.
The divisions we see today are political divisions based on differing world views. The hot button topics of division are not from the legacy of slavery, hut over climate change, immigration, globalism, etc.
This seems to be another variation of, “The racist right is causing all the division. We should have put them down when we had the chance, and we’d all be singing Kumbayah now if we had.”
While one might be forgiven today for believing we live under a unitary government, it is true the federal government is a creation of the states, not the other way around. It is perhaps reasonable to suppose prior to the Late Unpleasantness that given it was a voluntary association to begin with, states could leave the Union.
This isn’t necessarily my opinion, merely pointing out that one would suppose at the time the argument could be made one or more states could decide to go their own way. Lincoln thought otherwise. It is sometimes said that prior to the war the verbiage was “These United States”, people thought of themselves a Virginian first, an American second. The civil war thus ended any notions of secession, right? It’s a suicide pact, for better or worse, or something.
History is complicated and dirty and a stone cold bitch. I am not a fan of the modern day “canceling” of American historical figures, because it is a fool’s errand to try and hold them to modern standards. Lee was a complicated figure, if I am not mistaken Lincoln offered him command of the Union army. He graduated #1 in his class at West Point, and was the only cadet to never receive any demerits, something like that.
One of the things that really struck me, reading one of Bruce Catton’s books, all the pundits were confident and thought the war would be over in weeks. People from Washington and surrounding environs were so confident in this assertion they traveled in their carriages and horseback by the thousands and made a picnic out of it at one of the earliest battles. They were all mistaken on that.
And the truth is the war could have been over in a few months, if not weeks. A series of epic blunders by Union leadership kept the war unbelievably all the way through 1861. And unbelievably into 1862. And finally in 1863, well by golly it’s over now! And oops!! nope, going on into 1864. And 1865. Truly crazy. Some people actually think that McClellan or others were Confederate sympathizers, or something.
I think it’s OK to make the argument for the execution of Confederate leadership, but that is not a position held by historians then or now, and it certainly isn’t because nobody thought about it till only recently. As a northern Yankee I respect the rebel military generals and our history, that does not mean I like them, it is what it is and our shared history shouldn’t be erased. They were also studied as tacticians at the War College. I certainly understand why removing a statue of Jeb Stuart or somebody from the county courthouse makes sense, however the problem becomes what I alluded to either - where does this end?
No historical figure can live up to today’s sensibilities, it is always an impossible standard. For one thing, it implies “I wouldn’t have done that, I’m better than that guy”, and there is no way to know that. When I was in school these kinds of silly arguments were allowed for obvious reason, but we live in a silly world now.
I’m well aware of the difference between a state-sanctioned execution and a lynching. I would accuse you of missing my point entirely, except that you got it in your last sentence.
Kill someone to make an example of them, and you’ve created a martyr. Agreed?
What’s wrong with hanging Nathan Forrest?
Maybe yes, maybe no, but being founded by a famous General certainly got it started .
And so?
Initially, the Emancipation Proclamation effectively freed only a small percentage of the slaves, namely those who were behind Union lines in areas not exempted.… It has been inaccurately claimed that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave;[83] historian Lerone Bennett Jr. alleged that the proclamation was a hoax deliberately designed not to free any slaves.[84] However, as a result of the Proclamation, most slaves became free during the course of the war, beginning on the day it took effect; eyewitness accounts at places such as Hilton Head Island, South Carolina,[85] and Port Royal, South Carolina[81] record celebrations on January 1 as thousands of blacks were informed of their new legal status of freedom. “Estimates of the number of slaves freed immediately by the Emancipation Proclamation are uncertain. One contemporary estimate put the ‘contraband’ population of Union-occupied North Carolina at 10,000, and the Sea Islands of South Carolina also had a substantial population. Those 20,000 slaves were freed immediately by the Emancipation Proclamation.”[86][87] This Union-occupied zone where freedom began at once included parts of eastern North Carolina, the Mississippi Valley, northern Alabama, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, a large part of Arkansas, and the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina.[88] Although some counties of Union-occupied Virginia were exempted from the Proclamation, the lower Shenandoah Valley and the area around Alexandria were covered.[86] Emancipation was immediately enforced as Union soldiers advanced into the Confederacy. Slaves fled their masters and were often assisted by Union soldiers.[89]
Some historians claim that it only declared slaves free in areas where Lincoln lacked the power to free them. It is true that the proclamation exempted the Border States, as well as Tennessee and areas of Louisiana and Virginia occupied by Federal troops. However, this observation ignores the fact that the U.S. Army occupied parts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Virginia, which were not exempted and where enslaved people did immediately become free.
Oddly you yourself cite wiki earlier.
Yes, and some others. Sure, only a few compared to the 3.5 Million, but still, much more than “not a single”.
This is true, and too many commentators want everything they dont like have roots in slavery… thus making it evil. Police? Evil. Guns? Evil. Etc, etc.
What was unclear about “most”? Sure, there was the odd Forrest. MOST of the people responsible for keeping the spirit of the confederacy alive weren’t Forrest. Many weren’t even in uniform or Confederate politicians.