There was an extensive effort to rehabilitate, called Reconstruction. There were plenty of reforms instituted and many black people elected to office in the south.
But the Republican Party’s commitment wavered—never having been all that strong in the first place—and the compromise that ended the disputed election of 1876 saw them just throwing in the towel completely. White southerners were then free to create its apartheid culture.
Exactly. There was real progress there for a little while. Just didn’t take. The minds of white southerners were not changed and once Reconstruction ended with the aforementioned deal (in an election with lots of voter suppression and ballot stuffing in the south), it was just over.
The Lost Causism (with the attendant happy slaves and benevolent masters) and the Noble South narratives gained traction. Lots of glorification and memorials for Confederacy followed in the South. And the nation as a whole went along with it and accepted skewed reasoning it provided. Even historians for while. Hell, up until at least the 1990s (beyond?), “states rights” was still the popular motif for movies set in and around the civil war to use. My history teacher brought it up in high school (also mentioned good parts of segregation) It’s still a big thing in popular culture today, even though it’s not what was being talked about at the time. People just liked that idea better for a long, long time, despite it not being the reality.
First of all, let’s be very clear; The GERMANS never had a day of reckoning. NAZIS did. The Allies cheerfully hanged Nazis by the score, and good riddance to them, not only in Germany but in their puppet states as well. But the German people were not punished - Germany was rebuilt and, at least in the West, its people treated with charity and dignity. Even German soldiers, sailors and airmen were for the most part treated decently, as long as they weren’t Nazis and even then a man just serving as a soldier in a Waffen SS division ended up just being sent home. So the OP proceeds from a somewhat incorrect title.
The comparison to make, therefore, is between the Nazis and their minions, and the Confederate government and military command structure. In that regard there are two enormous differences:
Nazis were the perpetrators of some f the most hideous crimes against humanity ever undertaken. They engaged in ceaseless wars of aggression, violated the laws of war, violated the laws of man and threw away any sense of decency. They were simply evil, full stop; there’s no point denying it. They were engaged in a war against civilization.
As atrocious as slavery was, it was a legally established institution and the Confederacy didn’t invade half the countries in the Western Hemisphere, murder millions of POWs, ten million or more innocents, and essentially seek to annihilate the moral fundaments of civilization. They were fighting to preserve a criminal institution but the conduct of the war - with, I grant, a number of awful exceptions - was generally done in accordance with the laws of war as they existed at the time.
There is also something of a disconnect between the institution of slavery and the people who engaged in the war of rebellion. Not all Confederates were slaveowners and not all slaveowners were politicians or soldiers. Conversely, a Nazi was a Nazi.
Ya had to live with them. The point of the war, to the Union, was restoration of the Union. The Union and its people were generally of the opinion that the country had to be reestablished as it was before, as closely as possible. You can’t hang everyone who owned a slave and then say “Okay, everything’s cool now.” It would have started another war. You didn’t have to live with the Germans; it was another country that could be re-formed in a way prioritizing it not being a threat again.
Japan was treated the way it was because suddenly The Russians Are At The Door. That’s really it - the US needed a pocket ally in that part of the world, and war trials are a poor way to make friends. They also needed Japan’s industry and economy back up pronto, so no restructuring the *zaibatsu *either no matter how they’d enabled the war.
The North didn’t have such a pressing need back in 1865.
I love Lincoln and think he’s our greatest president, but sometimes I can’t help but think that if he was more forceful post-war, we wouldn’t have the entrenched and celebrating racism we do now.
With hindsight and no idea if this would be possible even in the Union, I would have gone and dissolved all government in the South and appointed a combination of loyal abolitionists and free black men into positions of power in the South. Post-war, I would have suspended our typical ways of doing things and given these people a kind of war reparation powers, maybe doubled the immediate appointee’s length of service to ensure they had enough power and time to be entrenched. I would have banned anyone who held power or served in the Confederate state and army from ever holding elected office, right down to local sheriff, give all of those positions of power to the freed slaves who were wronged. I would have seized assets from plantation owners and given them to the blacks, and jailed and killed anyone who resisted. With their army disbanded and infrastructure destroyed, it would have been much easier to do this. I have no idea if there was an appetite for it, but I would have tried given what I know of the future. Its just complete and utter shit that we still have to deal with the sore loser descendants of the objectively wrong slave owners and their ilk. The first KKK should been caught and set on fire alive as an example 150 years ago so they aren’t endorsing presidential candidates now. Fuck. Sorry, that was a bit of a rant
To be fair, “states rights” was the reason, in that the states felt that their rights as states were being infringed by the Federal government, but the state right that they were all fighting for was the right to own slaves. So it did boil down to slavery in the ultimate analysis, but not nearly as simplistically as the earlier “all about states rights”, or the current “it was all about slavery” concepts would have you believe.
And de-Nazification was potentially not as far-reaching or comprehensive as the Nuremberg trials would have you believe; plenty of lower-level former Nazis were installed in, or remained in positions of lower-level power after the war. They just tried and hung a lot of the ringleaders after the war.
He was assassinated less than a week after Lee surrendered, I don’t think you can put a lot of blame on Lincoln’s post-war efforts.
So you would restore the Union by revoking the rights of United States citizens? This seems more consistent with conquering a foreign nation than ending an attempt to leave the Union.
What is the legal status of a traitor? Lee should have been convicted of treason, hanged, and displayed on a gibbet in every state in the south and everyone who had served in the confederacy on any capacity should have been barred from voting or holding any responsible office for life.
That’s what I was going to say. The South never got their day of reckoning on racism because the North never had its day of reckoning on racism either. Nobody cared about ending racism. Even slavery was just an instrumental concern for the North; their primary war aim was keeping the country together.
Assuming that Lincoln rounded up all the Southerners and put them into re-education camps to eradicate slavery, he’d have virtually nobody to actually teach the doctrine.
If you were looking for a way to provoke even more resentment and retaliation against innocent black people in the South, this would have been a winner.
Also, it would have voided most white Southern support for and participation in the US military for a lifetime following, which would be a mixed outcome, but might not have worked out well for some parts of the 20th century.
I doubt that would have had more than 1% support. You honestly think the Union did not have many of the same beliefs? How you going to force the army to do what it doesn’t want to do? Hell, NYC, didn’t even want to participate in the war to an extent. The Day New York Tried to Secede You going to raze NYC? You’d lose the war much less the peace.
Funny how post war mythology has infected both regions.
Didn’t Lincoln try to preserve the Union by taking it easy on the South? He was trying kill them with kindness, when instead he should have declared martial law across the South for a few years
As far as I’m concerned, when the South revolted, they forfeited their rights. We would have remade them into US territories instead of states and denied them the rights of citizens. The land still belonged to the US, no question about that, but it was wartime and should be treated as spoils of war
That is a ridiculously simplistic statement about a very complex, decades-lasting and still lingering subject. You could write multi-volumed books about it (and I’m sure someone has). Hint: it didn’t went like this: the REAL bad guys got judged at Nuremberg (heck, a slimy clever handsome scum like Albert Speer got away with 20 years), the lower ranks got swiftly denazificated, everybody knelt down and swore “I’ll be a good boy by now and an upright commie-hater” and everything was wine and roses. Except for those many nazi war criminals who escaped, many via the rat lines with aid by catholic cleric and US intelligence, there remained millions of bureaucrats, officials, clerks, policemen, judges etc etc. who had been good functioning and loyal executives during the nazi era who just couldn’t get rid of without a break down of civil order. Those, well, were “denazificated”, but many stuck to their former convictions and their influence remained, most atrociously in the field of justice: the early Federal Republic of Germany was very reluctant to judge nazi criminals because of that influence, and the ball only really got rolling by the braveness of one prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, with the Auschwitz trials in 1963. The outcome of these trials were IMHO not ideal, to say the least, and the following history of the prosecution of nazi criminals by German justice was often embarrassing, up to today.
There’s, for instance, the famous case of chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s important secretary Hans Globke. When Adenauer (who himself had been a staunch anti-nazi, his personal reputation is undoubted in that regard) was confronted with Globke’s nazi past, he famously quipped:
[Quote=Konrad Adenauer]
Man schüttet kein schmutziges Wasser weg, solange man kein sauberes hat.
One does not throw out dirty water so long as one does not have any clean water.
[/Quote]
And this exactly was the common attitude in the early years of the federal republic. This radically changed with the student revolt in the mid-sixties, when the new generation dared to ask their parents and grandparents the uncomfortable, nagging question “What did YOU do between 1933 and 1945?”. In a longer process, the view on those shameful years changed in the following years also in the mainstream, and from about 1970 on a real confrontation with our own past could happen on every social level, and the Warschauer Kniefallbecame possible (and Willy Brandt got much flak from the right for his gesture). Of course, a fringe of that student revolt turned terrorists, the RAF, which bit us in the ass during most of the seventies, and was a cruel joke of history: the opposition against historical crimes of contempt for mankind turned into an outbreak of inhuman crimes, but it shows how our nazi past haunted us still.
I’ll cut it now, though I could go on and show how this is an important subject till today, but I hope you get my gist so far. And we haven’t even handled the denazification process and handling of old nazi cadres in East Germany yet…
The South did not embrace States Rights when New England considered secession in 1814 because “Madison’s War” was destroying the New England economy.
The South did not embrace States Rights when Northern states wanted to use the idea, born in the South, of Nullification, the idea that a state could “nullify” a Federal law it found odious. The South demanded that Northern states accept and enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.
The war was fought because the South chose to secede over slavery and the North chose to go to war to preserve the union. However, states rights was nothing more than a pre-war tactic to preserve slavery, (and a post-war rationalization to support secession).
The South had already been punished unto oblivion by the war. There were few southerners left to teach any doctrine to. The North was pretty wrecked as well. Even if they had felt the same hatred for slavery that we feel today, they would have not had the will or capacity to sustain the hate. The war extracted an unexpected and enormous price for maintaining the Union and freeing the slaves. Punishing what remained of the South after the conflict ended would have been conducted in retribution for rebellion, not for slavery.
Any further punishment visited upon the South would have been viewed as pathological at the time, and I see no reason now to question them.
Instead, we named U.S. Army posts after him and other Confederate generals. At least it’s amusing that someone as ineffective, arrogant, self-sabotaging, and disastrous as Braxton Bragg is now the namesake of Fort Bragg, which is generally considered the unofficial headquarters of the Army outside of the Pentagon. Good thing they haven’t picked up any of his traits.
[QUOTE=John DiFool]
When WWII ended, we found all sorts of evidence for the Holocaust-as did the surviving German peoples. A good chunk of the German populace then forswore that anything like that would ever happen again-and the antisemites and Neo-Nazis were immediately reduced to a small fringe with very little political power.
[/QUOTE]
Aside from what everyone else has pointed out, with Germany, the post-war West German government took its legitimacy (and tried to root itself) from the German anti-Nazi resistance before and during WWII. Both the main conservative party (Christian Democratic Union party) and the main left wing party (Social Democratic Party) looked to leaders who were either generally anti-Nazi during WWII or were imprisoned by the Nazis for their anti-Nazi activities/stances. Since Nazism was mostly discredited as an ideology after WWII, it was easier for individuals and society as a whole to make a more or less clean break and reject it.
The regimes in both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan publicly based their legitimacy on their respective ethnicity’s superiority. Their defeat gave truth to the lie that they were somehow uniquely genetically or culturally superior to their neighbors. It was part of their national ideologies, in much more focused a way than it was for any individual Western country like the U.K. or the U.S.
Slavery was not an ideology, in that white supremacy is not dependent on or otherwise rooted to slavery as an institution. And since it was couched from the beginning as being a “state’s right” to decide on whether slavery is legal or not, as we have seen, slavery as an idea can be easily discarded while still maintaining a states’ rights perspective.