Don't confuse forgiveness with vindication. The neo-rebs make this point all the time, but it doesn't fly. Just because the north was lenient and wanted to reunite the country as quickly as possible doesn't mean the rebels weren't guilty.
Deo Vindice!
It really wouldn't have done the nation any good to round 'em all up and hang them, although that probably would have made Confederate revisionists less noisy.
You can look at places like Iraq to see what happens when one side trashes the other ~ they never forget!
George Washington was offered a pardon by the British - he refused, saying he had done nothing wrong. His allegiance was to his state, not to the British crown.
Hi. I haven't posted to you before, and I'm sure you're a nice guy.......but that's crap!
Andrew Johnson and the United States Government held Jefferson Davis in a federal fortress for years without trying him. Then they let him go. Why?
Because the poorest lawyer in the country would have cut the Government's case to ribbons, that's why!
"Forgiveness", my butt hurts!
Policy, is all it was. They held the South in their hands. They could have done whatever they wanted, even given flyblown Ben Butler the executioner job he so craved.
So don't give me this "well, we aren't going to give you a fair trial after all -- but just go on home and consider yourself guilty as charged". That's buncombe of the zeroeth magnitude and the rankest degree.
No Southerner was guilty of anything, for defending the South. Remember that!
Incorrect. Guilt was never established because it simply wasn't there. Here is what a northern abolitionist legal scholar had to say on the subject of prosecuting confederates for "treason"
To determine, then, what is treason in fact, we are not to look to the codes of Kings, and Czars, and Kaisers, who maintain their power by force and fraud; who contemptuously call mankind their "subjects;" who claim to have a special license from heaven to rule on earth; who teach that it is a religious duty of mankind to obey them; who bribe a servile and corrupt priest-hood to impress these ideas upon the ignorant and superstitious; who spurn the idea that their authority is derived from, or dependent at all upon, the consent of their people; and who attempt to defame, by the false epithet of traitors, all who assert their own rights, and the rights of their fellow men, against such usurpations.Instead of regarding this false and calumnious meaning of the word treason, we are to look at its true and legitimate meaning in our mother tongue; at its use in common life; and at what would necessarily be its true meaning in any other contracts, or articles of association, which men might voluntarily enter into with each other.
The true and legitimate meaning of the word treason, then, necessarily implies treachery, deceit, breach of faith. Without these, there can be no treason. A traitor is a betrayer --- one who practices injury, while professing friendship. Benedict Arnold was a traitor, solely because, while professing friendship for the American cause, he attempted to injure it. An open enemy, however criminal in other respects, is no traitor.
Neither does a man, who has once been my friend, become a traitor by becoming an enemy, if before doing me an injury, he gives me fair warning that he has become an enemy; and if he makes no unfair use of any advantage which my confidence, in the time of our friendship, had placed in his power.
For example, our fathers --- even if we were to admit them to have been wrong in other respects --- certainly were not traitors in fact, after the fourth of July, 1776; since on that day they gave notice to the King of Great Britain that they repudiated his authority, and should wage war against him. And they made no unfair use of any advantages which his confidence had previously placed in their power.
It cannot be denied that, in the late war, the Southern people proved themselves to be open and avowed enemies, and not treacherous friends. It cannot be denied that they gave us fair warning that they would no longer be our political associates, but would, if need were, fight for a separation. It cannot be alleged that they made any unfair use of advantages which our confidence, in the time of our friendship, had placed in their power. Therefore they were not traitors in fact: and consequently not traitors within the meaning of the Constitution. Furthermore, men are not traitors in fact, who take up arms against the government, without having disavowed allegiance to it, provided they do it, either to resist the usurpations of the government, or to resist what they sincerely believe to be such usurpations.
It is a maxim of law that there can be no crime without a criminal intent. And this maxim is as applicable to treason as to any other crime. For example, our fathers were not traitors in fact, for resisting the British Crown, before the fourth of July, 1776 --- that is, before they had thrown off allegiance to him --- provided they honestly believed that they were simply defending their rights against his usurpations. Even if they were mistaken in their law, that mistake, if an innocent one, could not make them traitors in fact.
For the same reason, the Southern people, if they sincerely believed --- as it has been extensively, if not generally, conceded, at the North, that they did --- in the so-called constitutional theory of "State Rights," did not become traitors in fact, by acting upon it; and consequently not traitors within the meaning of the Constitution.
Well, that was just about half the nation at the time..... to call half the nation traitors doesn't wash. If you had a renegade state or a small insurgency you would have a point. There were significant problems that were serious enough to divide the nation at the time... your label just doesn't stick.