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But I also grew up hearing how the South was treated so badly after the war, how brutal Reconstruction was, and how the South still paid a heavy price for its rebellion and secession.

Do you have any historical knowledge of how the losers in other great civil wars were treated?

In the English Civil Wars the leaders (and many of the followers) were proscribed, their property confiscated and they were often executed.

In the Spanish Civil War somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 of the losing side were executed after the war was over.

In the Taiping Rebellion, which took place about the same time as our War, 20M to 30M people died, many of them civilians massacred by the Manchu after the end of the fighting.

After the WBTS, the number executed in revenge by the winners was somewhat smaller. Exactly one, in fact.

The War of Secession was only a civil war from the standpoint of those who denied the right of the Southern states to secede. From the Southern perspective, they were no longer part of the US and had no desire to impose their rule on the North. In other civil wars it's usually a question of wanting to control the whole country--as in the Spanish Civil War or the English Civil War. The Nigerian Civil War may be more like ours--it was one section of the country wanting to become independent. The war which led to the independence of Bangladesh could be considered the Pakistani Civil War, but again it was one area wanting to separate from the rest.

It would be interesting to know how many South Vietnamese were killed by the Communists after their victory in 1975--again, a civil war from one perspective (the North's)--but there was an unspoken agreement after the fall of South Vietnam not to learn how many were killed by the Communists. Tito killed many of his opponents after winning what was both a civil war and a war against foreign occupation.

Charles II had a few of those most responsible for his father's beheading executed. Later, when Bacon's Rebellion was put down in Virginia, he was upset at the governor of Virginia for killing more people in punishment for that than he had killed for killing his father.