The traitors should have been hanged and their property confiscated after the Civil War. It was the legal norm in nation states at the time and it would not have been questioned except, of course, by the doomed traitors themselves. Instead, they were forgiven and allowed back into power. This policy of national reconciliation after the Civil War turned out to be one of the worst mistakes in American history, perhaps the crucial mistake that could yet lead to our downfall. The ex-Confederates, being amoral traffickers in human flesh, naturally knew nothing but to extort the highest price they could possibly get, and the rest of the country willingly paid. Jim Crow, the “Lost Cause” myth, and a full century of continued segregation and oppression were that price. The effects are still very much with us. Just yesterday, a lady I know started in about the kindly masters and the benefits of slavery. I told her I did not want to hear it.

General George Thomas of Virginia, who was ostracized by his family for refusing to betray his country, possibly said it best.

[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed. This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property—justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people—was not exacted from them.