How would you have treated confederate leaders?

[minionofmidas]

More or less the same as they were in real life.
The two main things I would have tried to do different are:
-The US government attempted to collect back taxes for 1861-4. That was dumb and vindictive (although of course totally legal and "logical"), not to mention highly damaging to the Southern economy, which needed money pumped in, not out. Now that's an amnesty the South should have goten but didn't.
-The Freedmen should have been compensated (as was demanded by the most Radical Republicans, as well as the Freedmen themselves.) "40 Acres and a Mule" was the cry of the time, and I endorse it, also it needs some modifications (such as for the differing fertility of the country. Also, in the inland cotton country, cooperatives would likely have worked better than small individual holdings) I have no problem endorsing seizing of large plantations for the purpose.
With that program in place, the Blacks' defranchising after 1876 simply couldn't have happened, and the South's history since might have been much happier.

[minionofmidas]

More or less the same as they were in real life.
The two main things I would have tried to do different are:
-The US government attempted to collect back taxes for 1861-4. That was dumb and vindictive (although of course totally legal and "logical"), not to mention highly damaging to the Southern economy, which needed money pumped in, not out. Now that's an amnesty the South should have goten but didn't.
-The Freedmen should have been compensated (as was demanded by the most Radical Republicans, as well as the Freedmen themselves.) "40 Acres and a Mule" was the cry of the time, and I endorse it, also it needs some modifications (such as for the differing fertility of the country. Also, in the inland cotton country, cooperatives would likely have worked better than small individual holdings) I have no problem endorsing seizing of large plantations for the purpose.
With that program in place, the Blacks' defranchising after 1876 simply couldn't have happened, and the South's history since might have been much happier.

The infamous "40 acres and a mule" was never a promise made by the government.

Yeah, I said that.
It's just sad that it wasn't.

[minionofmidas]

I'd have dropped the issue of back taxes and instituted a speedy land reform in which all slaves received land and/or money while all plantation owners would have been reduced to working class standards. I'm not sure whether or not I would have bothered with criminal proceedings against the main traitors - since it was technically impossible to try all the traitors, it would have been difficult to reasonably draw the line anywhere, so dropping the issue makes sense.

[minionofmidas]

I'd have dropped the issue of back taxes and instituted a speedy land reform in which all slaves received land and/or money while all plantation owners would have been reduced to working class standards. I'm not sure whether or not I would have bothered with criminal proceedings against the main traitors - since it was technically impossible to try all the traitors, it would have been difficult to reasonably draw the line anywhere, so dropping the issue makes sense.

The only traitors were those in the US Federal Government.

At least we agree that noone lost his citizenship.

[minionofmidas]

I'd have dropped the issue of back taxes and instituted a speedy land reform in which all slaves received land and/or money while all plantation owners would have been reduced to working class standards. I'm not sure whether or not I would have bothered with criminal proceedings against the main traitors - since it was technically impossible to try all the traitors, it would have been difficult to reasonably draw the line anywhere, so dropping the issue makes sense.

The only traitors were those in the US Federal Government.

At least we agree that noone lost his citizenship.

There were no "traitors".  There is nothing in the Constitution which says states can't secceed.  In the Articles of Confederation, the Union was perminant, but the framers of the Constitution abandoned such language, because many of them, though not all, believed that states reserved the right to leave if they had legit grievences.  At the same time, precedent in the courts lead inthe direction of a perminant union, so there was certainly reason to see things that way as well.

Actually, no. There is nothing in the Constitution that says states can't secede because there is nothing in ANY constitution that says states can't secede because unless there is something that says they CAN, the fact that they CAN'T (by a legal process) is self-evident. The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union did not include anything about the Confederation's permanency either, except in their name. Nor did anyone claim that states could secede until more than a generation after the Constitution was framed - the idea only won wide credence after the doctrine of Nullification was dead and buried.
If secession had been considered possible in 1787, it's extremely unlikely the Constitution could have passed at all. The big states were angry enough at the amount of concessions needed to buy the smaller states as it was.

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Only in the sense that slavery was an American problem. America here used in the sense of the continent.

[minionofmidas]

2. Break up plantations and give land to both poor whites and blacks.
3. Permanent federal troops.
4. Anyone under the age of 12 gets sent to northern boarding schools until they come of age.

For once MasterJedi comes up with some good ideas!

I'd also institute a lifetime ban on the right to vote and own property for all Confederate veterans. I'd also send federal troops around to destroy and desecrate every Confederate graveyard, and at random select some dead veterans to be dug up, have their bodies cut to pieces and have the pile be left at their family's doorstep.

Ugh. What is it you want to accomplish - keeping the flame of secession alive for ever? Really man, that's disgusting.

Not to mention that idea 4 would have been entirely unworkable.

[minionofmidas]

Pointing to other Constitutions is irrelevant, as it ignores one obvious historical curiosity which seperates the USA for other countries, and that is, the United States were Thirteen Independent entities which formed a single nation.  They granted powers to the Federal government.  Unlike almost every other nation where the powers of the states were handed down to them by the Federal Government.

False... many federal states have that legal fiction. And in many of them - Germany for instance - it's not really a fiction, unlike in most of the US. Although in others the "states" are really subdivisions created by the central government, just as in the US outside the western seaboard. India would be a good example of such a fake federation.

--- EDIT: Eastern. The Eastern seaboard. ---

There *is* a good argument for ignoring other constitutions though -  all the modern ones postdate the US'.

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No, not just slavery.  No offense, but I love how you can look down your European nose at Americans and claim that slavery was an "American" problem, when the practice was very prevelance for old world countries right up until WWII.  Sure, "real" slavery had died in Europe 17th and 18th century [/quote]Uh, "real" slavery died all over Western Europe during the Dark Ages. Although lesser, but still abominable, forms of bondage did indeed survive into the 19th century.

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Where?

Of course slavery was introduced in the Americas by Europeans. That wasn't my point at all though - rather, I was trying to draw attention to the parallel debates in the British and French colonies, in Cuba and Brazil.

As to the other points... they aren't ones. Henry advocated *not joining the union in the first place*, not "secession". He did so in part *because it was understood that it would be impossible to secede from it*.
And alas, all the sectionally charged political issues of the antebellum period - "States Rights", homesteading, tariffs, wars of annexation, Right of Petition - are largely variants on the overriding issue of slavery. That is, none would have been sectionally charged without it. None could have led to civil warfare. (And yes, Northerners could invoke "States' Rights" and Nullification too. Quite apart from the Hartford Convention, think of the Fugitive Slave Acts.)

--- EDIT: Quite apart from the fact that all the Hartford Convention eventually ended up doing is discuss a joint strategy to push for some constitutional amendments: An end to the three-fifth rule, a term limit, and rules making it harder to admit new states being chief among them.

[minionofmidas]

1) Indentured servitude is still "real" slavery

Uh, no. Mind you, it was bad enough, but it didn't compare to serfdom by any measure. And that didn't compare to slavery by a mile. (Unless we're talking Russian"serfdom", which was indeed slavery rather than serfdom. Slaves could be bought and sold, and shipped to other parts of the country, and are their owners sexual property. None of which held for serfs.)

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Not really, unless you count apprenticeship. Which did indeed have elements of what you'd call indentured servitude.

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Uh, no. You know what share of the Deep South's population were slaves? About 50%. Besides, indentured servitude was well on its way out by the Civil War - its peak relevance was in the 18th century. When, by the way, it was more common in the South than in the North.

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That's part of the reason why the situation was recreated after 1945, ie why (at least until 1990) it still isn't a fiction in the way it's entirely a fiction in the US (outside the original 13 states plus Texas).

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Nope. Check your facts. What's true is that the issue was flying around in New England at the time, but that's neither here nor there.


On the matter of the legality of secession, though, there's something else to consider.
The claim that it was legal for a state, as a matter of course, to secede, is an unequivocally false one, and one not even made by the vast majority of CSA statemen. That wasn't the issue at all.

But US legal and political thinkers agreed that people, and perhaps states as well, have a natural right to resist tyranny. (Which also meant that the US came into being legally. ) Which they hadn't vested in the Feds under the Constitution, and which was therefore retained, in the Constitution's phrase, "by the states, or the people". It was this right that Deep Southern states, with the uttermost of flimsy reasonings, claimed to be exercising when they seceded. It was this right that Upper Southern states, with somewhat better justification, used when they considered themselves free to join the secession after Fort Sumter. (Constitutional Unionists, this latter group was frequently called at the time, as opposed to Unconditional Unionists. To quote some North Carolina newspaper from december 1860, denouncing SC's secession and declaring it's support for the Union for now, "A union of force, held to together by force, and perhaps by blood, is not the union of the Constitution." Buchanan shared these views, hence his reluctance to do anything against the blatantly unconstitutional secession - he felt that acts of force to get them back to heel were probably unconstitutional as well. Normally, there might have been a Supreme Court to solve these matters, but the SC had just completely lost all moral weight it had ever had, thanks to the Dred Scott case.)
The 1812-era NEern radicals too viewed the Madison administration as tyrannic, pointing to its blatantly partisan treatment of the different regions' defense needs (they didn't trust the New England state militias...) which meant that a region that hadn't wanted that stupid war (not that the war was purely the US' fault, of course, the Brits were just as idiotic) ended up suffering the entire brunt of it.

[minionofmidas]

Federal troops should've stayed in the South at least until the end of the 19th century to ensure blacks got all the civil rights they deserved, particularly the right to vote.

The disaster that happened when Hayes ended the Reconstruction shows that federal troops needed to be mantained for as long as was necessary to protect blacks.

Not sure that this was inevitable. If Johnson hadn't at first made idiotic promises that he then couldn't keep, and if there hadn't been spiteful acts like the back taxes etc, it's by no means clear that the White South would have gotten as reactionary as it did. Also, notice that Black voting rights did not collapse right after 1877 everywhere even as it was. The process wasn't completed until after the collapse of the Populists, in the first decade of the 20th century.

[minionofmidas]

All of them should've been tried for treason. The main political leaders should've been executed. I'm not so sure about some of the military leaders, particularly Robert E. Lee, who at least was not convinced of the morality of slavery.

I think the largest plantations should've been broken up and land given to poor whites and blacks. Federal troops should've stayed in the South at least until the end of the 19th century to ensure blacks got all the civil rights they deserved, particularly the right to vote.

No matter what the neo-Confederates say, the Civil War was fought fundamentally over slavery. All of the leaders of this breakaway nation were fighting for this inhumane institution and should have faced justice. Many deserved execution. The disaster that happened when Hayes ended the Reconstruction shows that federal troops needed to be mantained for as long as was necessary to protect blacks.

Just to prove to you that the civl war wasn't fought about slavery, let us explore two alternate realities:

1) The CSA wins the war. Due to their free trade policies, other nations such as Britain use it to encourage them to abandon slavery. Reluctantly, they do, as it would be uneconomical for them to do otherwise, and prosper from their trade. Without the disastreous perios of Reconstruction, Southerners don't blame their problems on the free blacks, thus preventing the world from having to feel the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan. Ultimately, the South promises to reneter the Union if they have lower tariffs. Under threat of seccesion, Woodrow Wilson is unable to become presidenet, thus saving the USA from the Federal Reserve, the income tax, and WWI.

2) The USA wins the war before the Emancipation Proclamation. As Licoln promises, the 13th Amendment (which would have made slavery legal) is passed. Due to Lincoln's protectionism, other countries cannot manipulate the USA into abandoning slavery. The horrible practice of slavery takes several more decades before it can be abandoned.

Your first scenario has a realism content of 0%. (The second also has a few major flaws but is not nearly as absurd as the first one.) And still wouldn't "prove" what you're saying it proves even if it were realistic. Are you at all aware of the distinction between a cause and an effect?

[minionofmidas]

To say that the Civil War was fought solely about slavery is simplistic. Granted, slavery was a big part of it, probably the biggest part, but not the only part.

Okay then, try and refute this:

All the sectionally charged political issues of the antebellum period - "States Rights", homesteading, tariffs, wars of annexation, Right of Petition - are largely variants on the overriding issue of slavery. That is, none would have been sectionally charged without it. None could have led to civil warfare. (And yes, Northerners could invoke "States' Rights" and Nullification too. Think of the Fugitive Slave Acts.)

The truth is, the war was *objectively* fought over slavery by the South, and over slavery and the, ahem, sanctity of the Union by the North, whatever people thought they were doing. Oddly enough, this is an issue on which scholarly historians and the uneducated public agree, while the half-educated public and more "popular"/simplistic historians have come up with another position that has some merits but isn't nearly well-thought-through enough.

[minionofmidas]

To say that the Civil War was fought solely about slavery is simplistic. Granted, slavery was a big part of it, probably the biggest part, but not the only part.

Okay then, try and refute this:

All the sectionally charged political issues of the antebellum period - "States Rights", homesteading, tariffs, wars of annexation, Right of Petition - are largely variants on the overriding issue of slavery. That is, none would have been sectionally charged without it. None could have led to civil warfare. (And yes, Northerners could invoke "States' Rights" and Nullification too. Think of the Fugitive Slave Acts.)

The truth is, the war was *objectively* fought over slavery by the South, and over slavery and the, ahem, sanctity of the Union by the North, whatever people thought they were doing. Oddly enough, this is an issue on which scholarly historians and the uneducated public agree, while the half-educated public and more "popular"/simplistic historians have come up with another position that has some merits but isn't nearly well-thought-through enough.

"Scholarly"? Do you mean history revisers like William C. Davis?

[uses google]

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No. I'm talking about actual historians.

[minionofmidas]

If slavery were the only issue, the Southern States would have (peacefully) re-joined the USA when Lincoln endorsed the "Corwin Amendment"
"No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."

That was after the Deep South seceded. They weren't, at that point, listening to what the North was saying.
Besides, everybody knows that a later amendment would have overridden this amendment, so it#s really a meaningless declaration of intent. It doesn't even ban the feds from regulating - or banning outright - the interstate slave trade.

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That's because the Emancipation Proclamation was, pretty clearly, unconstitutional, but was trying not to be. It was legitimized as an emergency measure aimed at preserving the Union. Banning slavery in (more or less) loyal territory under that logic would have been pretty unconvincing.

[minionofmidas]

CSA Constitution
Article 1 Section 9 (1) The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same.

That's international (and had been the law since 1809, though oft circumvented). I was talking about interstate.