Alex Cruikshanks: Every day proves Thaddeus Stevens right: there should've been big Nuremberg-style public trials of leading Confederates, accompanied by seizures of the assets of all pro-Confederate large landowners and businessmen, which should then have been distributed to freed slaves as compensation.

Every day proves Thaddeus Stevens right: there should've been big Nuremberg-style public trials of leading Confederates, accompanied by seizures of the assets of all pro-Confederate large landowners and businessmen, which should then have been distributed to freed slaves as compensation.

These guys are traitors to the republic just like their heroes Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee

The fact that there wasn't a big public trial like this allows room (however slim) for ignorant morons to hold them up as heroes. It's total nonsense, but you're right. There should have been no ambiguity in how the treason and insurrection was dealt with after the war.

Summary executions of at least a few, like Forrest.

Forrest definitely should have seen the short end of a rope.

I like firing squad given the pedigree of hanging, but I’m not too particular about this historical fantasy.

Yeah, just executing every officer who ordered the murder of noncombatants would have saved a lot of trouble after the war.

Well Forrest was almost uniquely terrible, and not just for that reason.

He wasn't the only one who did that and were awful post war too!

The Confederate states should not have been readmitted to the union. They should have ceased to exist. They forfeited their sovereignty by rebelling. The territory should have devolved to the federal government and been administered by it indefinitely.

Maybe in a few decades, after the slaveholding class was long dead, you could have formed some NEW states out of that region. You know, Grantland, Shermania, that kind of thing.

It’s funny we handled it exactly how these things were historically handled up until WW2, that’s where we finally learned how to end conflicts permanently after a war.

Right, yeah! My grand plan of course has the benefit of post-WWII hindsight. In 1866 it was not just politically impossible; it was basically unimaginable.

And rename Virginia Thomasland for native son George H. Thomas.

Imagine a world without Texas

Possibly. They did of course break Virginia into two, though carving new states out of other Unionist areas would've been a trade off against leaving the rump even more full of traitors.

100%. You can't have truth and reconciliation if you don't acknowledge the truth or reconcile the wrongs that were committed. They just swept that shit under the rug.

Charles Sumner: "I never cease to regret that Jeff. Davis was not shot at the time of his capture."

I've seen estimates that as few as 5000 executions would have been enough to "reboot" Southern society and give the freed slaves a fighting chance.

Tired: The Union won the civil war Wired: The civil war didn’t stop, it shifted to a different phase Inspired: the Confederacy won the civil war, ultimately

This is glib, obv. But the real sure part is how the GOP is the modern incarnation of the confederacy and we’re sitting here arguing with each other instead of focusing on firing them into the sun.

As I’ve been saying, when we win again this time, they get no quarter

Let’s say Biden is replaced btw. I don’t trust these guys anymore not to panic at the first sign of something and taking everything further off the rails into distractionland like this.

I'm pretty sure that Confederates in the Attic more or less implies that last point, and it was written in 1998, well before Trumpism, etc.

I don't think we can claim the last part until this election year is over.

There really isn't one current American problem that wouldn't have been made better by more Confederates/slaveowners being executed at the end of the Civil War. No way Tom Cotton has his current job.

a big problem was that the socially radical party was the economically conservative party, and vice-versa.

so you had Northern Republicans freaking out that if Jefferson Davis's assets could be seized and redistributed, why not theirs?

"He's a convicted traitor and you're not" should've been the easy answer. Seizing the assets of wealthy enemy leaders wasn't a new idea, it was done during the Revolutionary War!

And instead we gave the slaveholders compensation for the slaves.

Then allowed them to reenslave them. At least Stevens and his crew fought that.

Exactly

Lee was responsible for more dead Americans than GEORGE THE THIRD, he should have been swinging in a noose in front of the senate building

Hell, the fact that there was only ONE such kind of trial after the war (involving the commandant Henry Wirz of Andersonville Prison in Georgia for his horrific conditions and leadership there - seriously, look them up) and not many folks TO THIS DAY know of it, just compounds on our great failures.

Everything about this country has been a fucking failure to seize the moment and do the right thing in the name of freedom and equality for everyone.

Instead of executing traitors and saving America Lincoln instead carried out the largest mass execution in American history by hanging native Americans for protecting land that even according to America was legally theirs.

The USA had a chance that it would never have again, and it was left to slip away like grains of sand through a fist

If we get another chance we're taking it 100%

Stringing Lee up like Mussolini would've been one hell of a message.

There might have been if not for the assassination of Lincoln and Johnson’s dismantling Lincoln’s plans for reconstruction.

Repeat this every day and twice on Sundays from every Pulpit in the Republic.

We need reconstruction 2

We never finished reconstruction 1 TBF

There should have been similar for the co-conspiratorial MOC who aided and abetted the coup attempt on J6. (but all their assets should be distributed to abortion funds, just to piss them off)

This will never be less than 100% accurate

Imagine a US where confederate peeps got the hague treatment and the US didn't save but instead went after the heads of the SS, dragging them to the hague as well. Sigh.

That's because Lincoln was dead and Andrew Johnson (a Southerner) was not partial to the idea. Jefferson Davis escaped the rope. Hope this link helps explain the FU of the ages: www.smithsonianmag.com/history/tria...

The Trial of the Century That Wasn'twww.smithsonianmag.com The case against Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, would have been a legal showdown of the ages

Also many ex confederates were lured to Brazil (a slaveowners paradise) www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_am...

They lost the Civil War and fled to Brazil. Their descendants refuse to take down the Confederate flag.www.washingtonpost.com Brazil’s confederados gather in Sao Paulo state each year to celebrate all things Dixie. As in the United States, calls are growing for a reassessment.

Brazil did not free its slaves until 1888. One of last countries in the Americas to do so. Jesus, even Mexico was ahead of us. They freed their slaves in 1837. www.npr.org/2021/02/28/9...

A Chapter In U.S. History Often Ignored: The Flight Of Runaway Slaves To Mexicowww.npr.org As the U.S. Treasury considers putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill to honor her role in the northbound underground railroad, new attention is being paid to the often overlooked southbound route.

Brazil is multicultural but very much a stratified society. The white wealthy people are at the top and the black and indigenous are below. People need to know that racism and inequality is not just in the US but exists in other countries in the Americas.

Yes

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