All Confederate traitors must die for their crimes

The hanging of the Nazis after Nuremberg did not create martyrs and the South was similarly bloodied and prostrate after 1865.)


But there was no Stalin.

The Germans had to cosy up to the West, because the alternative, Uncle Joe, was too horrible to contemplate. They had to keep tight hold of a Western "nurse" as the only shield against a Soviet "worse". If that meant letting top Nazis go to the scaffold, it couldn't be helped.

There was no equivalent situation in the South of 1865.
 
I don't see why there would be the need.

At the end of the war, I get the impression that most people in the newly re-united US were simply grateful that the fighting had ended. Would there really be demand for the level of reprisal which would see the entire Confederate leadership comdemned to death? The Union would gain nothing save a much more vengeful KKK.

Quite aside from the fact that trying to hang Robert E Lee would bring the kind of international condemnation and domestic unrest that the newly reunited USA really wouldn't need.
 
It was probably wise not to execute the Southern leadership, though it was unfortunate that the section of the community most linked to the treason was left able to dominate land and much of society

As a matter of law the Union would have been acting legally had the hanged everyone who assisted the Confederacy, they were after all making war on the United States which is treason under the deliberately narrow definiiton in the US Constition
 

Typo

Banned
It might cause long term resentment, but partisan warfare much larger than the KKK was pretty much impossible by 1865. A full third of the white adult population of the south was killed in the war, a situation which was coincidentally the same as Germany's after WW2. The southern society was broken on too many levels that it would rather embrace what would be a mild occupation for most people even if it means a few of its leaders has to be executed.
 
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Typo

Banned
But there was no Stalin.

The Germans had to cosy up to the West, because the alternative, Uncle Joe, was too horrible to contemplate. They had to keep tight hold of a Western "nurse" as the only shield against a Soviet "worse". If that meant letting top Nazis go to the scaffold, it couldn't be helped.

There was no equivalent situation in the South of 1865.
there wasn't many partisans in DDR either you know.
 

Typo

Banned
Hanging 'Massa Lee' could get you in a world of hurt - no matter what our opinion of him today might be there is evidence his men 'loved' him as a commander.
His men might have, but they only numbered in the low tens of thousands by the end. What people don't know was that Lee's godhood status in the south was a postwar product of the lost cause movement, itself the cultural product over the loss of the ACW. Lee was far more popular in say 1880 than 1865.
 

Typo

Banned
True, but other bloodied people were willing to fight on. Right wing resistance groups in Lithuania, Ukraine and Poland fought untill the 1950s despite the huge amount of suffering their countries experienced. Likewise, famous (or infamous) Yugoslav right wingers managed to avoid capture for years post 1945. And Yugoslavia is a small country.
None of which are even remotely similar to the south in 1865, those nations never saw themselves as Russian, and Stalinist occupation was far worse than the outright lenient one the union had in the south.
 
None of which are even remotely similar to the south in 1865, those nations never saw themselves as Russian, and Stalinist occupation was far worse than the outright lenient one the union had in the south.

A vengeful north executing political and military leaders was not going to be seen as a lenient occupation, especially in a honor based culture.

Also, what kind of union troops would be doing the occupation? My guess is that almost all veterns would be demobilized. The now more aggressive occupation would be conducted by potentially arrogant troops who had never seen combat (no learned respect for confederates) and led by officers with no experience in "when to give and when to take".

The result could well be a lingering guerilla war for the next 10 years or so.
 
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