There are increasing cries that the United States needs to heal, reconcile, and move on. Please let us guard against the healing processes that occurred last time.
On January 6th, afraid that their way of life was crumbling (under the onslaught of nonwhites and their friends), a broad cross-section of Trump’s cult attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the recent presidential election. The last insurrection in the United States was the Confederates firing on Fort Sumter to start the Civil War and preserve their way of life. We must guard against the kind of healing and reconciliation that happened after the Civil War.
First, the losing Confederates suffered no punishment. While recognizing their acts as treasonous and otherwise harmful to the nation, Presidents provided pardons to them.
Lincoln issued 64 pardons for offenses, including treason, intending to grant more pardons, but Congress objected. After Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation granting amnesty to most Confederates. This act was one of his articles of impeachment.
Black Reconstruction was quite successful as many blacks participated in local, state, and national governments and brought about some innovations, like state public education. However, the so-called Southern Redeemers were fighting extremely hard to grab control of the state governments.
Their efforts reached fruition in 1877 with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise. The presidential election was a mess with no clear winner in the electoral college weeks after the election. The South, represented by Samuel J. Tilden and the Democrats, offered a deal to Rutherford B. Hayes and the Republicans.
The Democrats were willing to give up the presidency if the Republicans (who were in control in Washington) would withdraw Federal troops from the South. These troops had been protecting blacks against violence and terrorism from white citizen groups and the Ku Klux Klan, among others.
Hayes and his Republicans took the deal and the presidency and ended all racial progress in the South.
Of course, they were aided significantly by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1883 the Court ruled that the great Civil Rights Bill of 1875 was unconstitutional. And to make matters worse, the Court ruled in the 1896 Plessy v Ferguson case that segregation was legal and supported by the Constitutional.
After the Civil War, Confederates were not facing treason or insurrection charges, and Reconstruction was rolled back.
Further, the North turned a blind eye to Jim Crow laws that proliferated beginning in the 1890s. Southerners began this furious pace to establish monuments to these so-called Confederate heroes to bolster these laws (and perhaps to intimidate blacks).
And the reconciliation with the North permitted the South to make the “Lost Cause” argument.
After the Civil War, it seemed that two of the significant efforts by the South was to push blacks out of citizenship activities and back to subservience to whites and to push the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, and equality suffered when they lost what they called the “war of Northern aggression.”
One of the effects of this turning over the South to the plantation owners and other segregationists was to prolong slavery. As Douglas Blackmon demonstrated in his book, Another Name for Slavery, slavery did not end until the middle of the 20th century. Now in control of local law, they found ways to keep many blacks in bondage.
The bottom line is Republicans in 1877 had been more supportive of blacks than Democrats are now. And they abandoned blacks. The Civil War was about race, and the January 6th insurrection was about race. Self-preservation means we must resist any of this talk about immediate reconciliation and insist that perpetrators be punished. And this should include elected officials as well as others.
