WI: "With malice towards some"

Thanos6

Banned
What if the Union had been harsher on ex-Confederates after the American Civil War? Let's say, any military man of officer rank, as well as all Confederate government officeholders, were put on trial for treason, with a guilty verdict almost certain. How would this affect Reconstruction and afterward?
 
This would take a POD that changes Lincoln's attitude. Perhaps if Thomas Jackson had gotten his way and waged a "take no prisoners, black flag" war against the North, Lincoln would have a different opinion on the matter. Also, an earlier Lincoln assassination could do it.

If there were massacres sanctioned by the Confederate government then I think a harsher response by the Union government would have been accepted by the southern public as inevitable judgment. If its an overly vindictive Union government then there may be a longer period of post-war partisan activity but overall I think the Southerners really were expecting much harsher treatment and the public was largely fought out. Imprisoning the top leadership wouldn't change much except nipping the Lost Cause in the bud.

Benjamin
 

Thanos6

Banned
Let's make that our POD then. A failed assassination attempt in late 1864/early 1865 gives weight to those in Lincoln's administration who say that unless the Confederate rulers are definitively, harshly punished, these madmen will keep coming.

If there were massacres sanctioned by the Confederate government

Er, there were; at the very least, they turned a blind eye.
 
Of course, this is a decision to indefinitely prolong the war.

Confederate officers are hardly likely to surrender if they face being executed when they do. They will take to the hills and fight on indefinitely, with as many of their men as will follow, until they are either caught and killed one by one. or until they are promised amnesty in return for giving up. The latter is far more likely.

As to massacres, they would have to be on a huge scale to make any difference. There were no reprisals for the one at Fort Pillow, though the victims there were Federal soldiers in uniform. If they didn't bother to avenge that, what would they avenge?
 
Unless Lincoln losses a son or Mary Todd, I think he would only punish those immediately responsible for any assassination attempt.

The best POD in my opinion would be for Davis to agree with Jackson in his call for taking no prisoners and put as many Union cities to the torch as a possible. If say Cincinnati, Evansville and other cities are put to the torch very early in the war and hundreds of Union prisoners are executed after the Confederate victory at Bull Run than the end will be bad for the Confederacy.

As for a long drawn out guerrilla war, I don't see it happening. An astute Union politician, like Lincoln, will make every effort to separate the poor whites from the plantation aristocracy. More likely we'll see a much larger Confederate exodus to Mexico, Brazil and other Latin American locales. Like WWII Germany the Confederacy (even in OTL) was pushed to collapse. In this scenario it will be worse and the war wary population will have the shame of the massacres to deal with as well. Reconstruction will be a simpler affair and there will be no Lost Cause ideology in the US. Instead there will be angry emigre populations of Confederates throughout Latin America, and this will cause a lot of butterflies down the road.

Benjamin
 
The best POD in my opinion would be for Davis to agree with Jackson in his call for taking no prisoners and put as many Union cities to the torch as a possible. If say Cincinnati, Evansville and other cities are put to the torch very early in the war and hundreds of Union prisoners are executed after the Confederate victory at Bull Run than the end will be bad for the Confederacy.


Atrocities early in the war are the key here, IMHO.

The Confederates got a pass on Fort Pillow not only because most of the victims were black but also because the Confederacy was already viewed as loosing when Fort Pillow occurred. By April of 1864 an actual military victory in the war by the CSA was seen as impossible by thoughtful observers north and south. The CSA's last real hope lay in Lincoln losing the election and not in CSA arms forcing peace negotiations.

Relatively small atrocities committed three years in to a horrific war with a casualty list already over a half million would not have the impact of larger atrocities committed at the beginning of the war when a certain "numbness" or "hardness" of feeling had yet to develop.
 
Some alternatives to going after all officers:

1) Keep the treason trials to politicians who voted for secession. The fig leaf here is that actual soldiers were just following the orders of the lawful leaders of their state, and those leaders are ultimately to blame.

2) Go after people who swore an oath to the Constitution. This will not include all CSA officers, though it will include some. It will rope in a whole bunch of other people, though, so you might need some more ad hoc limits than that.

3) If the POD is CSA massacres, then you go after the units that did it and their chain of command, plus high ranking officials who approved. Interestingly, this might accelerate the idea of "war crimes."
 
I think the key event here would have been a deliberate Confederate decision to 'take to the hills' in spring 1865 and wage on-going partisan warfare. That is what younger officers like Porter Alexander were urging on REL as the end was obvious. Certainly the example of REL and Joe Johnston to surrender and tell the troops to go home and be good citizens had a tremendous influence. That is not what Davis and his remant loyalists wanted. Perhaps the POD is for Lee to succumb to an agina attack on the retreat from Richmond and become a martyr. If the senior offices of ANV disperse to the hills with their troops that would be the signal to other commanders like Johnston, Richard Taylor and Kirby-Smith to do the same. Let alone Forrest and those of his ilk. Now the denouement to the ACW becomes a vicious and bitter partisan war. Under these circumstances any and all Confederate officer and offical becomes an enemy of the Union and subject to summary execution.
 
An intelligent option would have been to have agreed to large scaled property confiscation in return for not prosecuting for treason
 
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