by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: May 06, 2009   Last Updated: April 02, 2012

Robert E. Lee avoided the hangman's noose because a fall through the scaffold would have stimulated another round of civil strife in a guerrilla phase-probably Johnson was willing to tolerate the retirement of the butcher of the civil war with Lincoln dead in Ford's theater; perhaps Johnson was a little sympathetic to the southern cause or concerned about his personal security if Lee was arrested and hung directly as he should have been (except for those of us opposed to capital punishment generally the leader of the southern treason was assuredly worthy of death for leading the treason.

The legal theory of a United States without a right of succession of any state became a moot point when adequate force and opinion existed to separate without the consent of dissidents to de-unionization. The laws of a nation such as the United States with its nominal democracy existed with the consent of the governed-the paradox is that without the right of succession it is difficult to dissent from being governed without exiting the nation. Presumably southerners had a right individually to exit the United States and move to Mexico. I had felt for some time that Florida would have been a better place to locate the capitol of the confederacy because of it's swamps, or at least Ashville North Carolina because of its altitude and inaccessibility for certain kinds of military formation. General Lee deserved to be tried for treason to the south too for not insisting that Richmond immediately give up its leadership city status for more defensible terrain, and for wasting so many lives from Gettysburg and Cemetery Ridge to the Wilderness campaign all the way over to Cold Harbor.

General Lee and Jefferson Davis if convicted of treason and hung would have been anticlimactic and politically pointless-the North had proven that it could win any conflict against secessionist states and antagonizing the southerners or troubling their already bruised pride farther would have been a bad policy choice. Like most American conflicts of large scale demobilization rapidly followed the conclusion of the civil war , and the federal government had little ability to send federal agents or garrison troops to police southern states following the war to enforce policy such as affirmative action. The best the U.S. Government could do was to take the political high ground of states remaining in the Union and slowly over time increase the civil rights prospects for the formerly enslaved southerners that

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