Makes you wonder if King George would have charged all of his traitors, doesn’t it.
Of course he would have. At the very least, every signer of the Declaration would have been hanged. This was SOP.
Should have been Lincoln’s SOP. As I said, charge them all (they therefore forfeit their plantations, i.e., “40 acres and a mule”) THEN pardon them all. Nothing unconstitutional, nothing illegal.
Charity and good heartedness always come back to bite you in politics.