Why the U.S. government would name installations after men who took up arms against it is beyond me. Their careers should have ended at the end of a rope.
If the U.S. military had taken your view of how to end the civil war then it would have ended in a very bloody guerrilla war. There was no reason to hang honorable men like Robert E. Lee.
Other nations have civil wars that become centuries long grudge matches.
Not ours though.
Why?
Lincoln set the stage - Lee was treated with respect at the surrender signing, and southerners were not designated as second class citizens and marched of to re-education camps like in commie Vietnam. It was conciliatory....and a brilliant way to handle the situation. Just a thought.
I’ll get into the argument. They did not take up arms against the federal government. All the fighting took place in the south. It was federal troops who marched south with war in mind. The first shots were fired at the troops of another nation that was holding a fort that belonged to the Confederacy. And that is a fact.
By the way, any others who weren’t southern you’d like to see hang? And, will you vote for Hillary or Bernie?
Is it not possible that those men - black and white alike, took up arms against the union because it had ventured so far from the original intent (a union of states, not a collection of states ruled by a powerful central government) that it was no longer recognizable as America?
While statistically “insignificant”, there were several thousand black soldiers in the CSA. Likewise, we seem to have forgotten that freed blacks owned black slaves in several northern states - not all that surprising, given the tribally-centered cultures from which they came and that blacks in Africa sold other blacks to slave traders as they do today...
The reason why the attorney general at the time delayed and drug his feet in trying President Jeff Davis for treason is he felt the trial would have put secession itself on trial. He did not think he could win and losing that trial would have put the entire war in a new ill light and cause another constitutional crises Davis demanded a trial and never got one and was eventfully released.