American civil war question

[BH]

Hi all,

My knowledge of the US civil war is not that great. I do know Abraham Lincoln was willing to negotiate with the south even into 1865. I assume the south had some clout for a while even then.

My question is this. Was the south so defeated it could not have stopped from happening what happened to the Nazi leaders after World War Two eighty years later?

I think sometimes that is what should have happened. Lincoln and Johnson should have just taken all the Confederate political leaders and hung them as well as all the southern aristocrats.

 

[Bomb#20]

I think sometimes that is what should have happened. Lincoln and Johnson should have just taken all the Confederate political leaders and hung them as well as all the southern aristocrats.

So, go all French Revolution on their asses? The Committee of Public Safety guillotined children for being aristocrats.

 

[Swammerdami]

I think sometimes that is what should have happened. Lincoln and Johnson should have just taken all the Confederate political leaders and hung them as well as all the southern aristocrats.

WHY do you think that should have happened? (And Nazi leaders were punished only for war crimes, and only after a trial. That is NOT what you seem to advocate.)

 

[ideologyhunter]

War crimes trials of 1946- onward: administered by allies who had coalesced to defeat a foreign aggressor.
Former CSA officials after April 1865: defeated rebels in a civil war who were (supposedly) taking pledges of loyalty to rejoin the Union.
Much different. Of course, the newly freed bondsmen and bondswomen were sold out within 11 years, as the North only imposed martial law through the election of Hayes, and after that paid little attention to the South and its treatment of the former slaves. By about 1890 all the power the freed blacks had gained was gone, and Jim Crow settled in for 75 years.
Considering the tremendous sense of grievance and sheer hatred felt by the rank and file CSA soldiers throughout the war and its aftermath, and the growing myth of the glorious Lost Cause, it is difficult to see that anything could've been gained for the newly patched-together Union by mass executions.

 

[laughing dog]

Hi all,

My knowledge of the US civil war is not that great. I do know Abraham Lincoln was willing to negotiate with the south even into 1865. I assume the south had some clout for a while even then.

Lincoln wanted to avoid a civil war and preserve the union - that is what the "clout" was.

My question is this. Was the south so defeated it could not have stopped from happening what happened to the Nazi leaders after World War Two eighty years later?

I think sometimes that is what should have happened. Lincoln and Johnson should have just taken all the Confederate political leaders and hung them as well as all the southern aristocrats.

Lincoln was deeply concerned with re-uniting the states after the Civil War. Remember the Civil War divided the country and even families. The rebels were defeated but they were not a different nation but our neighbors and family. The South was ravaged during the war. Hanging the leaders and the "aristocrats" was not an option for the healing to start.

 

[Bronzeage]

Hi all,

My knowledge of the US civil war is not that great. I do know Abraham Lincoln was willing to negotiate with the south even into 1865. I assume the south had some clout for a while even then.

My question is this. Was the south so defeated it could not have stopped from happening what happened to the Nazi leaders after World War Two eighty years later?

I think sometimes that is what should have happened. Lincoln and Johnson should have just taken all the Confederate political leaders and hung them as well as all the southern aristocrats.

Politics is pragmatism turned into a science.

The first thing to consider is, the Confederate States did not try to exterminate any particular ethic group. The Nazi leaders and lower ranking Nazis were executed for their actions in the Holocaust, not some perceived act of treason.

The Confederacy ended because it lost its political will to fight. There was no benefit to hanging Jefferson Davis or any of the other leaders. There' a big difference between "Surrender or die," and "Surrender and die."

The fundamental question of any purge is, when do you stop? Do we hang Confederate generals, but not Colonels? Maybe stop at Majors. It all sounds like a recipe to keep a war in progress until there's no one left alive.

 

[Trausti]

The commandant of Andersonville was tried and executed.

 

[bilby]

The American Civil War wasn't really a Civil War at all. It was a War of Secession by a clearly defined subset of a larger nation, which the secessionists lost.

In a true Civil War, both sides occupy the same territory before the war, and borders and front lines tend to form in a fragmentary way largely unrelated to pre-War borders, as the sides consolidate their areas of support.

Of course, when the winner is the side refusing to allow secession, they have a huge vested interest in claiming that the war was always within a single polity (ie a Civil War), and not between distinct geographical areas.

Hanging the leaders of the losing side can be an effective way to end a Civil War; The people who might make martyrs of those hanged are held in check by neighbours who supported the victors. But trying to end a War of Secession (or any kind of war between disparate states) that way requires a massive occupation force in the losing side's territory. After WWII, that's exactly what happened. Soviet forces remained in East Germany, and US, British and French forces in West Germany, for fifty years after the war, and (at least in the West) there was a huge and expensive de-Nazification program, as well as an even more expensive reconstruction program.

The Union didn't have the will, and arguably not the money or manpower, to keep the Confederacy down if the South really did rise again. So they opted for indoctrinating the people with the idea that they were not only now on the same side, but that they always had been. That was an effective way to avoid future armed conflict without a generation long military occupation, but meant significant watering down of ideological imposition of Union values onto Confederate States. They freed the slaves, but couldn't or wouldn't prevent their being systematically abused by their former owners and their descendants.

Hanging the Confederate leaders would have dangerously undermined that indoctrination.

 

[untermensche]

The commandant of Andersonville was tried and executed.

Not for secession.

 

[Bronzeage]

The commandant of Andersonville was tried and executed.

Anderson was convicted of murder and various other crimes, for shooting prisoners in his charge. There were several charges of murder and eye witnesses testified at the trial.

 

[Trausti]

The commandant of Andersonville was tried and executed.

Not for secession.

Nazis weren’t executed for being Nazis. They were executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

 

[Trausti]

The commandant of Andersonville was tried and executed.

Anderson was convicted of murder and various other crimes, for shooting prisoners in his charge. There were several charges of murder and eye witnesses testified at the trial.

Which is similar to the Nazis who were executed. There was testimony from witnesses and other evidence. Former prisoners testified against the Auschwitz crew.

 

[Jarhyn]

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I could speak as to whether enslaved people in the civil war were killed rather than being released by any plantations and/or soldiers.

Any history buffs recall whether the people who did that were hung?

We're the people who hunted down black people like escaped animals hung?

The people involved with the Auschwitz of the United States went free.

The people involved in the White Night went free, too.

It seems to me some trials were skipped.

 

[Toni]

The American Civil War wasn't really a Civil War at all. It was a War of Secession by a clearly defined subset of a larger nation, which the secessionists lost.

In a true Civil War, both sides occupy the same territory before the war, and borders and front lines tend to form in a fragmentary way largely unrelated to pre-War borders, as the sides consolidate their areas of support.

Of course, when the winner is the side refusing to allow secession, they have a huge vested interest in claiming that the war was always within a single polity (ie a Civil War), and not between distinct geographical areas.

Hanging the leaders of the losing side can be an effective way to end a Civil War; The people who might make martyrs of those hanged are held in check by neighbours who supported the victors. But trying to end a War of Secession (or any kind of war between disparate states) that way requires a massive occupation force in the losing side's territory. After WWII, that's exactly what happened. Soviet forces remained in East Germany, and US, British and French forces in West Germany, for fifty years after the war, and (at least in the West) there was a huge and expensive de-Nazification program, as well as an even more expensive reconstruction program.

The Union didn't have the will, and arguably not the money or manpower, to keep the Confederacy down if the South really did rise again. So they opted for indoctrinating the people with the idea that they were not only now on the same side, but that they always had been. That was an effective way to avoid future armed conflict without a generation long military occupation, but meant significant watering down of ideological imposition of Union values onto Confederate States. They freed the slaves, but couldn't or wouldn't prevent their being systematically abused by their former owners and their descendants.

Hanging the Confederate leaders would have dangerously undermined that indoctrination.

The United States was 'the same territory.' It was the same country. The same nation.

As for what happened after the end of the US Civil War: I wonder if you are aware of the Union troops in southern states? Or Reconstruction?

https://www.armyheritage.org/soldier-stories-information/the-occupation-of-the-south/


By the end of the war, the Union had about 600,000 soldiers and the south had about 200,000 soldiers who were in worse shape physically than the Union soldiers.

The South had far less resources than the North at the start of the war and most of the battles were fought in Southern and border states.

https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm

 

[bilby]

The American Civil War wasn't really a Civil War at all. It was a War of Secession by a clearly defined subset of a larger nation, which the secessionists lost.

In a true Civil War, both sides occupy the same territory before the war, and borders and front lines tend to form in a fragmentary way largely unrelated to pre-War borders, as the sides consolidate their areas of support.

Of course, when the winner is the side refusing to allow secession, they have a huge vested interest in claiming that the war was always within a single polity (ie a Civil War), and not between distinct geographical areas.

Hanging the leaders of the losing side can be an effective way to end a Civil War; The people who might make martyrs of those hanged are held in check by neighbours who supported the victors. But trying to end a War of Secession (or any kind of war between disparate states) that way requires a massive occupation force in the losing side's territory. After WWII, that's exactly what happened. Soviet forces remained in East Germany, and US, British and French forces in West Germany, for fifty years after the war, and (at least in the West) there was a huge and expensive de-Nazification program, as well as an even more expensive reconstruction program.

The Union didn't have the will, and arguably not the money or manpower, to keep the Confederacy down if the South really did rise again. So they opted for indoctrinating the people with the idea that they were not only now on the same side, but that they always had been. That was an effective way to avoid future armed conflict without a generation long military occupation, but meant significant watering down of ideological imposition of Union values onto Confederate States. They freed the slaves, but couldn't or wouldn't prevent their being systematically abused by their former owners and their descendants.

Hanging the Confederate leaders would have dangerously undermined that indoctrination.

The United States was 'the same territory.' It was the same country. The same nation.

According to the Union. The Confederacy disagreed, but they lost.

As for what happened after the end of the US Civil War: I wonder if you are aware of the Union troops in southern states? Or Reconstruction?

https://www.armyheritage.org/soldier-stories-information/the-occupation-of-the-south/


By the end of the war, the Union had about 600,000 soldiers and the south had about 200,000 soldiers who were in worse shape physically than the Union soldiers.

The South had far less resources than the North at the start of the war and most of the battles were fought in Southern and border states.

https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm

Yes, I am aware of all of that.

 

[untermensche]

The commandant of Andersonville was tried and executed.

Not for secession.

Nazis weren’t executed for being Nazis. They were executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

No leaders of the Confederacy were killed for war crimes.

The US Southern traitors were just allowed to go home.

The Nazi party was eliminated.

 

[Trausti]

Nazis weren’t executed for being Nazis. They were executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

No leaders of the Confederacy were killed for war crimes.

The US Southern traitors were just allowed to go home.

The Nazi party was eliminated.

What war crimes? Not to say that bad things didn't happen; but with the Nazis there was a central policy of genocide. Of course, the idea of crimes against humanity, or even war crimes, would have been new or perhaps just unknown to people of the mid-19th Century. Amusing that Napoleon was treated so kindly after Waterloo. Kaiser Wilhelm spent a comfortable retirement in the Netherlands.

 

[untermensche]

Nazis weren’t executed for being Nazis. They were executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

No leaders of the Confederacy were killed for war crimes.

The US Southern traitors were just allowed to go home.

The Nazi party was eliminated.

What war crimes? Not to say that bad things didn't happen; but with the Nazis there was a central policy of genocide. Of course, the idea of crimes against humanity, or even war crimes, would have been new or perhaps just unknown to people of the mid-19th Century. Amusing that Napoleon was treated so kindly after Waterloo. Kaiser Wilhelm spent a comfortable retirement in the Netherlands.

At Nuremberg 12 of 24 were sentenced to death.

11 of those 12 were convicted of war crimes.

Principle VI

The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

(a) Crimes against peace:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

(b) War crimes:

Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

(c) Crimes against humanity:

Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.
Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials

 

[Jarhyn]

What war crimes? Not to say that bad things didn't happen; but with the Nazis there was a central policy of genocide. Of course, the idea of crimes against humanity, or even war crimes, would have been new or perhaps just unknown to people of the mid-19th Century. Amusing that Napoleon was treated so kindly after Waterloo. Kaiser Wilhelm spent a comfortable retirement in the Netherlands.

At Nuremberg 12 of 24 were sentenced to death.

11 of those 12 were convicted of war crimes.

Principle VI

The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

(a) Crimes against peace:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

(b) War crimes:

Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

(c) Crimes against humanity:

Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.
Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials

So, just pointing this out, when is racial slavery not a genocide? How is organized suffering, selective breeding, existences of forced rape and child theft, of having your culture literally whipped out of you not equally and differently awful as an organized systemic murder?

 

[untermensche]

So, just pointing this out, when is racial slavery not a genocide? How is organized suffering, selective breeding, existences of forced rape and child theft, of having your culture literally whipped out of you not equally and differently awful as an organized systemic murder?

At Nuremberg crimes were defined as things the Germans did that the US and Britain didn't do.

So bombing civilian populations was not a war crime because the US and Britain did it.

Torture, even to death, was not a war crime.