Clearly, treason isn't as simple as you make it out to be. Even if he was tried and convicted, there would almost certainly not be a hanging, as most people charged with treason don't end up with capitol punishment
How would you punish the rebel leadership after the American Civil War
- Thread starter Marklin
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They all get to go to the back of the line as far as statehood goes. With the federal government limiting what can be taught in their schools for 100 hundred years.
They lost an election and cried about taking their toys and leaving it was a common threat from the south, it was never legal and always a club they used against their fellow countrymen.
Let us buy and sell black people as if they weren’t human beings or we will leave.
Let us go into your states search your property without warning for my property that ran away or we will leave.
Oh we don’t actually have to prove that a black man woman or child is our property to to take them argue and we will leave.
We kinda like slavery and remember when we said we wouldn’t force it on you, yeah we changed our minds accept or we gonna leave. They didn’t like the outcome of the election but I guarantee you if Lincoln lost the election they would not have tried to leave…at that moment. The civil war was inevitable even if not over slavery.
How would the Federal government enforce that?
Once the Union Army is back to peacetime levels there will be far too few troops to police the South in any effective way. There will be fewer troops in the South than there are schools. And any federal attempt to interfere in how a #State ran its schools would be quashed by the Supreme Court.
Anyway, as long as Federal taxes are being paid, what else matters? Why *bother* to do anything drastic?
Ah yes, state run schools. In the south. In the 1860s. Pull the other one.
You’re both being way too anachronistic here.
Right now Texas dominates the textbook industry, and their textbooks downplay social struggles abuses of minorities are ignored, slavery is “immigration” the progressive era and the abuses it fought are all but erased, the labor movement of the United States is cast as a struggle between progress on one side and socialism and tyranny on the other. The civil war was about states rights not slavery… give me a break. The north lost the peace. We see the consequences. A harsher penance would have done wonders. In the lead up to the war abolitionists set up private schools to push their agenda (not a bad thing). The federal government could have magnified those efforts to an incredible degree for the benefit of all put perhaps the planter class.
Ok make that "how schools within its borders were run".
The North did *not* lose the peace.
It fought to restore the Union, and last time I looked the Union was still there. As early as 1898 Southern boys were enlisting in the US Army for the Spanish War. They were loyal Americans again, which is exactly what Lincoln hoped they would become once secession was defeated.
After Jan 1863 it also fought to abolish outright chattel slavery, but not for race equality , which was never a war aim. Congress toyed with it for a few years after the war, but even post-1877 the North still had *everything* that it had fought for.
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Not many Americans have ever been charged with treason. It is pretty straight forward, if you fight against the Government of the United States your a traitor. The Federal Government hasn't executed anyone since I think 1963, but they still have the authority to do it. The Rosenberg's were executed for war time espionage. The Confederates were lucky that the president's were Lincoln, and Johnson.
Your right that the Union achieved it's war aims, but the education system of today has been very accepting of the Myth of the Noble Southern Cause. My Southern friends tell me how they learned in school that the Civil War was about States Rights, not Slavery. Federal overreach is what started the war, and the South was justified in fighting the Union. They somehow think that America would be better off today if the South won. They can't seem to make the connection that the nation would be split in two. They also can't seem to come to terms with what kind of country the CSA would be, and what it's founding principles were.
None of which endangered the US in any practical way.
It was similar in Britain. Seventy years after Culloden, the Prince Regent was prancing around in a kilt, supposedly of the type worn by Jacobite Highland rebels who had done their darnedest to overthrow his family. And novelists (English as well as Scots ) would be romanticising them for generations to come. Similarly, in the comics of my childhood, stories set in the ECW were invariably pro-royalist, though Charles I's victory might well have turned us into an absolute monarchy.
It is quite common (at least in the Anglo-Saxon world) for victors to sentimentalise over a fallen foe - once he is safely defeated. And the South benefited from that.
BTW, by Prinny's time no one remembered for certain what kind of tartans had been worn at Culloden. But, unwilling to miss out on a bawbee or two, the Scots just invented one for his benefit.
I can't go into why it's very bad for that type of education today, because it involves current politics. The issue of what dynasty was ruling over the UK in 1815 wasn't live, the issues over the Civil War in America are.
All a bit academic though, since there was nothing the government could have done to *prevent* the Lost Cause being romanticised in this way. Indeed most of the suggestions on this thread would most likely have *reinforced* that tendency.
British reprisals against the Highlanders after Culloden were really savage, and the Highland Chieftains were stripped of their power much as some people here would like to have done to the planters. But it made no difference. The Jacobites were thoroughly sentimentalised nonetheless, as no doubt the Confederates would still have been even had their leaders been hanged or otherwise penalised. Indeed, had Jefferson Davis been hanged his image on Stone Mountain might now be even bigger than Lee's.
Dagoth Ur
Banned
I think it's more that all soldiers at the time were lucky the presidents were Lincoln and Johnson. Had the president and his regime been some hardass one that was going to execute all Confederate leaders and officers, and reduce the southern population to a kind of 1984-level thoughtcrime-policing military occupation as seems to be a pretty popular solution to some, the war would have gone on for much longer. For one thing the Confederate Army experienced lots of desertion of normal good boys who were sick of suffering and dying for the planter class. If defeat were to be harsher, I have no doubt there would have been fewer deserters.
I didn't suggest hanging anyone. But more Federal resistance to the violent imposition of White Supremacy would've been a good thing. The education system should never have been allowed to glorify the Confederacy. That many Southerners think honoring the Confederacy is American patriotism is a perversion of history. Those Highland heroes weren't held up as British Patriots, their Scottish Patriots. Any way you slice it a dynastic dispute isn't on the same moral plane as a succession movement to preserve slavery.
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Since this hasn't been locked for necro, I assume mods are cool with this
Give their congress, Generals, and of course good old jefferson Davis the biggest, highest profile trials possible. Make it the most humiliating ordeal possible, but entirely legitimate; they're tried properly, but charged with so much, with so many witnesses, over such a timespan, defense against it all becomes impossible. Hopefully, it will make them look like cruel, uncaring idiots. I don't know a lot about how Davis conducted his part of the war, maybe he was more hands off than lincoln, but but lee was brutal and illegally took free people into bondage.
As for the soldierly, planters, and others? Volunteer soldiers are stripped of rank and property and given a rather harsh jail sentence. Conscripts are given a much smaller sentence and are allowed to keep some decent property. Planters see their estate whittled down to the minimum possible for a family of their size to support, with the lands being carved out between slave and poor white. Normal civilians are simply left alone; the states are still under occupation and getting the commoners pissy will only be a problem
Give their congress, Generals, and of course good old jefferson Davis the biggest, highest profile trials possible. Make it the most humiliating ordeal possible, but entirely legitimate; they're tried properly, but charged with so much, with so many witnesses, over such a timespan, defense against it all becomes impossible. Hopefully, it will make them look like cruel, uncaring idiots. I don't know a lot about how Davis conducted his part of the war, maybe he was more hands off than lincoln, but but lee was brutal and illegally took free people into bondage.
As for the soldierly, planters, and others? Volunteer soldiers are stripped of rank and property and given a rather harsh jail sentence. Conscripts are given a much smaller sentence and are allowed to keep some decent property. Planters see their estate whittled down to the minimum possible for a family of their size to support, with the lands being carved out between slave and poor white. Normal civilians are simply left alone; the states are still under occupation and getting the commoners pissy will only be a problem
What do they resist *with*? By 1876 the US Army was down to less than 30,000 men, of whom only about 3,000 could be spared for duty in the South.
As Lucy Hayes asked a critic of her husband's policy "What was Mr Hayes to do? He had no army." An exaggeration but only a very slight one.
Also, what "education system" do you mean? The Federal Government had no role in education in those days, and State governments often little more.
Why should any of this make the slightest difference?
For Pete's sake, just a couple of years in Ft Monroe was enough to turn Davis from a discredited failure into a Blessed Martyr to the Cause. Indeed it aroused sympathy even in the North to the point where an old abolitionist like Greeley was ready to put up bail for him. Putting him on trial would do nothing save provide the Dunning school with a few more things to criticise.