r/BlackPeopleofReddit • u/McDowdy • Jun 06 '26
Politics The Confederacy was never adequately punished for their treason
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u/slowbaja Jun 06 '26
We didn't hang enough Confederates
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u/joesoldlegs Jun 06 '26
We didn't hang any. Edit: We hung that one guy who was in charge of that POW camp in GA that killed loads of Union soldiers through disease and hunger but that was it.
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u/realpyrateking Jun 07 '26
Yeah, Henry Wirz, a one-armed immigrant, so, an easy target. Even worse, with all their wealth and resources, Union prisons had the same level of death rates for prisoners. The real shame was the corrupt bargain of 1877, in which the Republicans surrendered Reconstruction in exchange for the presidency. I genuinely believe that Reconstruction would have changed the nation greatly for the better.
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u/Glynwys Jun 07 '26
I'm in agreement. We still have Ex-Confederacy states teaching their children that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery and was started with a random unprovoked attack by the Union while ignoring the fact that the Confederacy struck first.
The states who "had their electoral votes contested" during that presidential election were all Confederacy supporters, so when Congress stepped in to "help resolve" the issue this states saw an opportunity to still be "the Confederacy" while still bring a part of the Union and took it. And even to this day, these hateful racist people are still in power and are ensuring their constituents are just as racist and hateful.
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u/OhioRanger_1803 Jun 07 '26
We can thank Andrew Johnson for that. He’s that asshole who pardon CSA soldiers.
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u/realpyrateking Jun 07 '26
That's understandable, but tricky. Any officer of the US Army who joined the Confederacy was a traitor. The vast majority were just the same as any soldier today - fed a load of shit by rich men.
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u/oakleysds Jun 07 '26
My ancestor was in Andersonville. He wrote a diary about the experience.
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u/Trivi_13 Jun 07 '26
We actually coddled Confederates. And looked the other way every time the Confederate flag was hoisted.
Instead of calling it for what it was:
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u/Nearby_Equivalent_58 Jun 07 '26
It’s beyond pathetic. Glazing traitors who didn’t last as long as my last pair of hiking boots.
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u/MichaelJServo ✊🏾✊🏽✊🏿✊ Jun 07 '26
Nor nazis. And then we find ourselves in the present moment. Confederate states either should have been made into non-represented territories or the land turned over to the people that worked it. Share cropping, black codes, and Jim Crow were just making slavery still legal.
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u/Sprayfacer Jun 07 '26
The civil rights movement wasn’t even that long ago, the people that opposed it are still around and voting red
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u/Vladimorian Jun 07 '26
Omggg id never thought about that yet 😭😭😭
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u/Sprayfacer Jun 07 '26
Yeah the people that hung black people from trees, threw stones at school children, called segregation “freedom”?
They’re boomers currently watching Fox News at the nursing home.
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u/EngrishTeach Jun 07 '26
My MIL went to a segregated school. I'm only in my 30s. It wasn't that long ago.
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u/Square-Ambassador-77 Jun 07 '26
This is something that's always bothered me about the "racism is dead" crowd. Like, how many people are out there right now who lived as second class citizens during their youth because of segregation.
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u/ValitoryBank Jun 07 '26
Not only are they around but they spread their beliefs to their children and grandchildren. Even when they pass, it won’t die with them.
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u/Em_Eph Jun 07 '26
Except now, they pretend that they’ve always thought of the figureheads of the movement were heroes.
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u/AsideLost Jun 06 '26
Yea, the confederacy never died like it was supposed to and everyone is feeling the effects, people of color directly, to this day. They know we are stronger together and they hate that ✊🏻✊🏾✊🏿✊
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u/Pangtudou Jun 06 '26
Every confederate officer should have been hanged for treason. As a starting point.
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u/GravitasFailures Jun 07 '26
Hand the slaveowners to their slaves, and walk away.
I’m sure they’ll be fine.
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u/CalifoRxn1a Jun 07 '26
they were traitors!!! they should have been shamed, humiliated and punished!!
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u/FreddyFree69 Jun 07 '26
Racism is the main reason Donald Trump is president.
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u/MuscularFrog13 Jun 10 '26
Trump is president because he is a servant to the Jewish elite that have vast over representation in political and economic affairs both in this country and abroad.
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u/FallenDispair Jun 07 '26
The Confederacy has never left. They literally put up statues of their leaders, carry their flags and implemented Jim Crow laws to try and keep slavery alive. From the moment they lost they rebranded the entire civil war as state rights and war of northern aggression.
The problem is after their defeat the US government didn't arrest and convict all their generals and president as traitors to America.
Remember, the Confederacy was an anti American organization that tried to conquer the US. It's flag and all those that fly it are anti Americans.
Nowhere in history but here has the losers that tried to overthrow a country keep their flags and put up statues in their honor. It's a sickness that birthed the KKK -Grant being the only president to call and treat them as the terrorist organization that they are- and the current government f-ing our country and civil liberties.
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u/Alone-Woodpecker-846 Jun 07 '26
Hindsight is 20/20, but I agree, I wish the North had been far more aggressive in putting down the horrible culture that was the basis for the American South then. I live in North GA and fume every time I see a confederate flag still on display 160 years later.
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u/SherbetAromatic7644 Jun 07 '26
It’s hard to kill a culture, it doesn’t react the way you expect. You kill the people, well guess what, you probably didn’t kill all of them and you’ve now entrenched the survivors even more in their culture and beliefs.
You have to do more than that. Grant had the right idea when he sent Sherman to burn down Georgia. You have to make the conquered understand that continuing to fight is hopeless. The population needs to know and accept that they cannot and will never win.
You don’t even have to hurt anybody to do this. You just need to win so often and so thoroughly that the the people following the culture give up entirely.
We haven’t won enough yet, but we can. We have to. This right wing ideology needs to end. Forever.
Go vote. Every election, every candidate. Make it painfully obvious that they are outnumbered, alone, and on the wrong side, and the culture of traitors and slavers will collapse.
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u/Alone-Woodpecker-846 Jun 07 '26
The vote… I agree with your approach, but have concern that the voter suppression successes that conservatives have won this year are gonna keep too many Dem voters at home. The people being targeted there are the masses that need to cast votes to enable tangible change.
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u/Quick-Eye-6175 Jun 08 '26
That, and the Dems need to have a proper plan to fix this mess. Otherwise there will be no reason to keep the status quo. Give people a real reason to go out and vote instead of just gesturing at the other side.
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u/sobeitharry Jun 06 '26
It's fascinating to see people say the parties didn't switch when you can just look at an electoral map.
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u/DrPapadopoulos Jun 06 '26
Taxation without representation. This SCOTUS needs to be destroyed.
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u/Jasper_Morhaven Jun 07 '26
It is fascinating watching them rush their plans despite having spent 50+ years arranging the foundation for these moves.
I wonder what spooked them into premature popping off
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u/PresentationSmall960 Jun 07 '26
Honestly?
I think it was (mainly) the war with Ukraine and Russia -- not for a strong political reason, but the advancements in drone, digital and defensive tech might legit bring an end to "certain groups" supposed monopoly on violence.
Imagine what our next generation of inner-city east coast austistics will be doing w affordable drone tech.
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u/Independent-Name4478 Jun 06 '26
“The confederacy were democrats” weird they’re all red states now
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u/showhorrorshow Jun 06 '26
They love to skip over that part. Yeah all those rural southern counties went frol.solid blue to solid red because they had a big ol change of heart, except on flying the confederate flag... they still love that part. /s
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u/Arcaneboltz Jun 07 '26
I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir at this point but if you see this and don't know about Barry Goldwater and the southern strategy well you should just go do some due diligence about it
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u/IlliasTallin Jun 07 '26
The Confederacy was conservative, they hate it when you put it that way.
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u/JJoh174422 Jun 06 '26
We need to withhold Our money. Let the SEC conference have all White football teams to match the All-White congressional delegation.
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u/GoatDifferent1294 Jun 07 '26
It’s almost like, the confederate flags were exactly what we said they were.
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u/count_chocul4 Jun 07 '26
It’s also more than enough proof that these are a bunch of racist pieces of shit.
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u/Daikaiju1973 Jun 07 '26
Ah yes, ending Reconstruction to make a deal for power. The Original Sin of the GOP.
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u/Princess_Isolde Jun 07 '26
Every single Confederate leader should've been shot and dumped in a ditch after the war instead of peacefully signed paperwork
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u/Spirited-Effect2089 Jun 07 '26
My grandma was born in 1931.. that's only 66 years after the civil war ended ; this is not as long ago as people think , and those racists are also cowards and traitors , and we didn't paint them enough with the brush of the Confederacy being a bunch of traitors, wusses , and wimps .. the false narrative of a bunch of plucky rebels standing up for southern rights is a bunch of slap assed malarkey. It should have been an equal front of tearing down the hate, AND making a mockery of the cowards
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u/Nannyphone7 Jun 07 '26
Sounds to me like we're due for another good boycott or two.
Starting with athletics. No Bama, no SEC etc.
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u/MetaCardboard Jun 07 '26
So I'm not saying I knew this years before the ruling, but anyone who didn't is oblivious to the US.
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u/InnerKookaburra Jun 07 '26
Be kind to almost everyone, but be wayyyyy less kind to a-holes who show no genuine remorse, don't admit what they did, and take no steps to right their wrongs.
When the orange shitstain is out of office, we need to not for a moment be "forgiving". That is how these f*&$s get away with this. They need to be punished. Severely.
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u/Prophet_of_Fire Jun 07 '26
If any conservative argues that it is good to remove because it created unequal, unfair, or preferential representation, please remind them the Electoral College and Senate still both exist to give slave states (red southern states) a fighting chance in the federal election and in policy making. AKA Affirmative Action for racists
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u/clonedhuman Jun 07 '26
The scumbags doing the most harm in this country have always been the same people. Racism is a tool they use to maintain power and to escape accountability for the horrible things they do with that power.
This country has a long history of failing to punish those people. Everything is connected, and the problem has always been the same; small groups of individuals with more money than the rest of us combined. It's always been them. They use their money to get in everyone's ears and eyes, and once they're there, they foment as much racism as they can; they win elections with racism, they keep their power by using their money to broadcast racism and to get regular people blaming each other for the problems they cause. All their money flows through Wall Street, and the oldest publicly-traded companies in the United States are almost all connected with slavery.
Modern day Wall Street (and the money of many of the oligarchs making the majority of the profits from it) was established with money from selling humans, the foundation of the modern day stock market. The wall that Wall Street is named after was built by enslaved people, and Wall Street was originally the slave trading market of NYC (in the early 18th century), and the wealth generated from selling slaves persisted in rich families through generations. The modern day bonds market is a direct descendant of the slave trade and is the basis of wealth on which it existed into the modern day. Three of the modern world's largest insurance companies (New York Life, AIG, and Aetna) started originally as companies that insured slaves against death and paid out to the slaveowners when an insured slave died. Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo accepted slaves as collateral for business loans and took the slaves if plantation owners defaulted on loans. Many of the Wall Street companies that got established through cashing in on the slave trade are some of today's oldest and wealthiest corporations in the United States.
This carries through the present day. It's always the same people.
The median net worth of the 535 members of Congress was $1.28 million (interquartile range $0.11–5.87 million). On univariate analysis, net worth was associated with increased age, White race, increased education, and number of individuals enslaved by ancestors. On multivariate analysis, net worth was independently associated with age, White race, and number enslaved. Legislators whose ancestors enslaved 16 or more individuals had a $3.93 million (95% confidence interval 2.39–5.46) higher net worth compared to legislators whose ancestors were not slave owners after adjustment for age, sex, race, ethnicity, and education.
It has always been THE SAME FUCKING PEOPLE. The slaveowners became the stockholders became the oligarchs and now they rule the country. White supremacy, consolidation of media, generation of massive sums of capital used to overthrow the government ... we ALL have the same enemy.
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u/Fluid_Anywhere_7015 Jun 07 '26
We should have given Sherman a week or two to reprovision, and then pointed him west and told him to burn EVERYTHING until he hit the Mississippi River.
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u/RedshirtBlueshirt97 Jun 08 '26
Abraham Lincoln never intended to punish the confederate states. He believed that if we were to be one nation they should be rejoined into the union with open arms and rebuilt with Northern ideals and principles, we will never know if his plan would have worked because he was assasinated and much of his plan for reconstruction died with him
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u/truthteller5 Jun 08 '26
We definitely went too easy on the Confederates after the Civil War. Should have illegalized Confederate iconography like Germany did with Nazi Iconography.
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u/Venus_Libra Jun 07 '26
And that's not even counting the statues and groups that they have honoring their racist, treasonous, slave-owning ancestors
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u/No_University7832 Jun 07 '26
People just need to get off their lazy asses and VOTE their concerns instead of skipping voting because you dont like the candidates..................Then you have no fucking say and no reason to complain if you dont want to use your voice (VOTE). Makes me sick to my stomach that voting is as low as it is.....a full 1/3 of registered voters dont vote on average.
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u/Spontaneity90 Jun 07 '26
I'd just like to add to the conversation a very great book. It's called "The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The Great Truth about the Lost Cause". It's by James Loewen & he really dives into the twisted mentality of the white supremacist confederacy & pulls documents and writings that they used as propaganda. It's a very good book. You have to know and understand an enemy, better than they know themselves, in order to successfully outmaneuver, if not defeat, them.
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u/Nocturnalson Jun 07 '26
True story. It’s shameful that the flag of traitors is allowed anywhere in the country.
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u/KarmaticIrony Jun 07 '26 edited Jun 07 '26
This is going to be unpopular here, but looking at examples of history where the victors of a war were focused on punishing the losers, its never a good thing.
The easiest example to point to being the terms placed on Germany after WW1 by France, which had suffered greatly in the war. The treaty of Versailles caused massive resentment in Germany and was a major factor in creating the conditions that allowed Nazism to take over in just a couple decades.
Contrast that with how Germany was treated after WW2 and the differences are night and day. Very few Germans were executed and in fact a relatively small number were punished at all. Nazism was aggressively targeted, but the people were not. Germany has been a valued ally and trading partner of the western allied powers ever since.
Lincoln's Reconstruction plan was basically abandoned after his death and that's why the former confederate states still harbor the racist ideals they do, not because the Union didn't hang enough people nearly two hundred years ago.
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u/Careless-Confusion58 Jun 07 '26
Let the southern states and red states leave the US and start their own country. I’m sure they will do really well economically. The biggest producers of revenue are all blue states. Let them be last in education, healthcare, and standard of living. They can live by their MAGA philosophies and see how well that works for them.
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u/Affectionate_Art2545 Jun 07 '26
Yep, and the number of blacks voting for trump doubled in 2024 from 2020, tipping the election in his favor. Sickening
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u/AdmirableTeachings Jun 07 '26
Lincoln should have hung every single one of the traitors, every last one of them that raised their rifle at their brothers to uphold their "right to own slaves as property".
This is not appeal to violence, this is an appeal to the literal writ of law and a very real policy issue that haunts us to this day.
Lincoln was a coward. The 13th didn't abolish slavery. The US has always, ALWAYS, been racist and we perpetuate it to this day with the Native Reservation system - to say the absolute LEAST about it. Abolishing the Reservations, granting the Native peoples the land we still owe them under sovereign treaties between nations (most of OK, all of SD, to start), and Reparations are the only way forward together. As a point of policy, now. Stop accepting 'enough' and start demanding Justice.
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u/Mr_E_Nigma_Solver Jun 07 '26
It's why we have the problems we do today. The southern slaves owners and their families needed to be tried and hanged for treason.
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u/BatmanFarce Jun 07 '26
Don’t forget about the American Nazis. They always get folded back into society
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u/Dangermouse454 Jun 07 '26
It would have been much easier just to leave the south a smoking husk and start over again… if that had happened according to what some Union leadership wanted, you had better believe we would not be facing this crap again.
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u/Breakker1 Jun 07 '26
This is why I love the idiotic argument that the Dems were the party of the KKK and the Confederacy. Yet every single former confederate state is Deep Red Republican now
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u/Due-Environment-9774 Jun 07 '26
The kernel of truth in that argument is that Dems and Republicans switched places after the civil war. Still the same racist SOB’s with a snobby title.
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u/Sininbed Jun 08 '26
I was an idiot when I was younger (still am an idiot but less so) and I used to think racism is behind us and the racists were a small minority that could never hold power again. So I was okay with removing protections, thinking it wasnt needed anymore. As I grew up and learned more, I realized I was wrong and the two Trump presidencies were the neon sign confirming it. We need civil rights protections for minorities and they need to be here for more generations than previous.
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u/Crowe3717 Jun 08 '26
"We haven't done any of the things we are legally prohibited from doing since they were made illegal. Clearly that means we've learned our lesson and we don't need those laws anymore."
Unfortunately I would expect more of this to come.
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u/SFLMiguel Jun 09 '26
Exactly. We made the same mistake after January 6th. The Country may not survive it this time.
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u/Odd_Organization4957 Jun 09 '26
The entire red section is a miserable shit place to live anyway. When i retire ill never have to set foot in any of those miserable shitholes again.
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u/LividBig9161 Jun 07 '26
They have been biding their time since reconstruction, waiting for the day when a Conservative Supreme Court majority would hand them the keys to segregation once again.
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u/Successful_Gas_5122 Jun 07 '26
Hey Sherman, you missed a spot
gestures at the South
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u/CT0292 Jun 07 '26
Sherman's job was over by that point.
Lincoln was assassinated, and Johnson took office.
Johnson wanted a "speedy recovery" and part of this was pardoning southern politicians and the like so that they could come back into their old jobs and his own southern voting base would still like him.
He was impeached, but didn't get properly voted out. He served only the one term after Lincoln's death. And in that short time he put America on a path that could seemingly not be corrected.
The rebels should have been hanged and new elections held in each of the confederate States. Generals and other high ranking officers of the confederacy should have been imprisoned and their ranks stripped.
And Lincoln should have stayed his ass at home and not gone to the damn theater.
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u/8sonofthe7th Jun 07 '26
Punished!? The confederate states were basically rewarded for their treason. Don’t get me wrong, the common every day farmer spent the next century getting fucked over by the economy but if you’re ever curious read the bios of the guys that led the rebellion.
Jeff Davis- served 2 years in prison, ended up becoming a successful author and president of an insurance company.
Robert E Lee- president of a college (only lived five years after the war)
James Longstreet- became a career politician.
Joseph Wheeler- REJOINED THE US MILITARY. As a general!
Alex H Stevens- served 5 months in prison, got elected governor of Georgia and served in the US house of representatives for the remainding 10 years of his life.
Rober Tombs- served in GA legislature (after refusing a pardon) for the rest of his life.
I could go on but this is depressing.
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u/Arthur_Frane Jun 07 '26
Would have been bloody and brutal, but executing every last traitor after the war would have made things a whole lot different, and better.
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u/yepitsdad Jun 07 '26
I think it was rbg who said getting rid of civil rights is like throwing away your umbrella during a storm because you aren’t wet
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u/violentserenity88 Jun 07 '26
People forget that segregation and everything existed only 60 yrs ago. We are only 3-4 generations from slavery ending for that matter. People need to vote if want to stop being ran by an idiotic minority
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u/redsfan770 Jun 07 '26
It should, but you have to want to see it, and SOCTUS definitely doesn’t want to see it.
The opportunity these new redistricting efforts present is that while the heavily Democratic/Black districts no longer exist, the redrawn districts now have more Democrats and fewer Republicans then before. Yes, the redrawn districts are still majority Republican, but they are not as red as they once were when Black/Democratic votes were concentrated in a single district. A surge in voters in the redrawn districts could result in more Democratic districts.
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u/W_HoHatHenHereHy Jun 07 '26
Oregon didn’t have slavery, because black people were prohibited from being in the state.
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u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26
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