Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War

[Drunkrobot]

What about those who kidnapped free men and enslaved them? What about those who raped and murdered slaves?

This is partly the reason why I mentioned earlier in the thread the necessity for the US to develop the concept of transitional justice, the nature of the crime of slavery in the South is not something any then-existing mode of justice is fit to handle. Every horrible thing that owners inflicted on their slaves, they did on the understanding that their right to own other human beings and do whatever they desired with them was enshrined in law. It was all perfectly legal, and it had been legal for as long as anybody could remember. Only the leadership of the Nazi regime and senior officers faced the gallows for their crimes against humanity, and even then it was because they had taken a society that tolerated Jews and other minorities and turned it into an engine of genocide, while even the leadership of the South simply found themselves born into a society where slavery was not only fine, it was sanctioned by God, and it had been that way all the way back to Jamestown. Northerners were for decades happy to let their Southern brothers own slaves, and to have their factories and markets supplied with slave-picked raw materials, and now they want to put the South on trial just because they've suddenly decided that slavery is evil?

If there's going to be something like peace, not just a Roman peace, then everybody has to either be taken out - marginalised, exhiled, hanged - or be given a dignified place in the new order. Every man that is hanged or shot means at least one brother or son swearing an undying oath of revenge, so all else equal the latter is preferable to the former.

 

[Tjakari]

Most of those rapists and murderers are about to lose all their property and "property" without any compensation, that seems like a pretty good form of justice to me.

Not even close. It's a good start, but there's more to be done than just appropriating some estates and calling it a day.
Those freed people have been tortured and held under duress so long as they have lived. "Justice" demands punishment for those who have perpetrated this crime. That implicates more people than just landholders. That requires more than a loss of property.

Is the full measure of justice in this case at all practical or expedient?

I would argue that justice against the planter class and only the planter class is actually very much doable so long as the proper resources are allocated to their prosecution.
But for all who've been involved in this act? From the families of the planters, the overseers, to the assorted managers and so on? No, I don't think it is.

It is a valid argument to make that peace and practicality demands a certain miscarriage of justice, that's basically what happened at Nuremberg.

@Drunkrobot was right about these sorts of crimes not having the ability to be properly punished, they're too vast and involve too many people. It's not within the means of a human system to even make the attempt without committing its own travesties, so restraint is forced by circumstance if nothing else.

But that miscarriage of justice, the willful refusal to prosecute to the fullest extent the perpetrators of a societal crime, shouldn't be confused for justice even if it has to be packaged (read "communicated") as such.

How about special courts just to deal with cases of slave owners who either raped or killed one or more slaves?

I'm not going to preach to you about the minimizing implications of this phrasing, given the moral character of holding another person in bondage. There does have to be some threshold for leniency here, and if you hang every man who's raised a whip in another's direction you'll just run out of rope. I'll just say, that the provision for such a court shouldn't be put in those terms.

Just a general restitution court should be palatable and effective.

That gives leeway for judges to do more than hang murderers and rapists, but also gives leeway to let the politically necessary amount of people off the hook. And it can also include more than just the planters themselves but those that worked for them, should the courts so choose anyway.

~Edited for more detail.

 

[DTF955Baseballfan]

The idea of restitution courts is good but it needs to be something that can't be declared unconstitutional as an ex post facto law. Slavery, as much as we hate to think about it 150 years later, was legal in those states were it was legal. Yes, there can and should be prosecution for those who raped or murdered slaves. In fact, if the north does it right they can get some former slaveholders on their side because not every slave holder did those things. Some look the other way, true, but some would criticize those who were so cruel, though I'll admit I don't know how openly it was.

I was looking at the Geneva Convention of 1864 because I was curious if anything in it could be borrowed for after the war. It seems to have only applied to soldiers at this point but even the 1864 convention probably has some things that America could apply and the victorious union could hold as international law to punish things done during at least the last months of the war.

However, the concept of international law light used to create some sense of what kinds of things could be seen as wrong in the future. And, I'm going to stop there because I think we need to step back a bit and remember that we are dealing with people in 1863. It is hard for any of us to remember that they do not have our morals and certainly not our experiences. The people of the 1860s did not have concentration camps or the Holocaust or the Bataan Death March or the Rape of Nanking or any of those things in their Collective conscience to color their ideas what should be made illegal by international law because they probably did not consider that mankind could sink to such a horrible low that such things would need codified as being illegal. Certainly there were evils in the past, but the lack of visual oh, what a long video, media made such things seem long ago, far away, and not nearly as relevant as they do for us.(Frederick Douglass is from what I've read the most photographed person of the 19th century and used that Medium very effectively to make his points about the evils of slavery.)

They do, however, have slavery. And as noted above, photography. And maybe, with enough effort, it can be a start. The whole idea of human bondage could be what begins the movements which OTL really only begun 3/4 of a century later, even though there was such a thing as the International Court I believe since the early eighteen hundreds.

This might be a way to allow Nations later to stop things such as human trafficking. Which is still a huge problem now. Perhaps committees decades later will work to take the Geneva Convention of 1864 and the Columbus or wherever Convention of 1866 - I would think it would be better without it being the former capital of the Union, feel less like it is the Union dictating things - and merge the two conventions into one.

 

[Starfox5]

This is partly the reason why I mentioned earlier in the thread the necessity for the US to develop the concept of transitional justice, the nature of the crime of slavery in the South is not something any then-existing mode of justice is fit to handle. Every horrible thing that owners inflicted on their slaves, they did on the understanding that their right to own other human beings and do whatever they desired with them was enshrined in law. It was all perfectly legal, and it had been legal for as long as anybody could remember. Only the leadership of the Nazi regime and senior officers faced the gallows for their crimes against humanity, and even then it was because they had taken a society that tolerated Jews and other minorities and turned it into an engine of genocide, while even the leadership of the South simply found themselves born into a society where slavery was not only fine, it was sanctioned by God, and it had been that way all the way back to Jamestown. Northerners were for decades happy to let their Southern brothers own slaves, and to have their factories and markets supplied with slave-picked raw materials, and now they want to put the South on trial just because they've suddenly decided that slavery is evil?

If there's going to be something like peace, not just a Roman peace, then everybody has to either be taken out - marginalised, exhiled, hanged - or be given a dignified place in the new order. Every man that is hanged or shot means at least one brother or son swearing an undying oath of revenge, so all else equal the latter is preferable to the former.

After the emancipation proclamation, slaves are legally free, so the legal argument won't help. But even if one went the despicable route of sparing the rapists and murderers, those who enslaved free men would still be punished for their crimes.

And, honestly, a peace bought by letting rapists and murderers go free is no peace at all. It's not as if everyone owned a slave in the South.

 

[Kitiem3000]

You could argue that rapes, murders, and re-enslavement which happened after the emancipation proclamation was a clear violation of the law. Not that I think it is necessary to really need an excuse to hang a bunch of rapists. With the way the two armies are moving towards a scorched Earth policy they will only need opportunity. Even after the Confederate surrender, it will take time to wind this style of thinking down. The first six months of occupation are going to be brutal.

 

[Triune Kingdom]

In regards to Reconstruction, would it perhaps be plausable to have Mixed Militias, which have both Freed Blacks and Southern Unionists/Poor Non-slave Owners? That could be a much better option, and could be much less of a stumbling block to reconciliation, if there is much less fear from retribution by Ex-Slaves among the white populace of the South. It is one thing to fight Yankees and Freed Slaves, but completely another having to confront your next door neighbor, if he is a part of newly established Militia Company, serving alongside freed Blacks.

I mean, Reconstruction is very much needed, but the point is to bring back these States back into the USA, while making sure that OTL course of events does not repeat itself, and not end up with bleeding sore for a couple of decades. Equality is what is needed, as well as confrontation with crimes and wrongdoings of the past, not turning a part of your country into an occupied territory which must be held under military occupation for decades.

 

[Drunkrobot]

@Triune Kingdom I think it could actually be plausible. We need to remember that while on paper there are white formations for white troops and black formations for black troops, it's inevitable for the chaos of war for mess up neatly-arranged OOBs. Casualties are taken, detachments need to be left and sent, and every now and then a frankenstein of a formation has to be made to meet the opponent; here, especially with the glory won by the USCT at Union Mills, some of those frankensteins will be made up of white and black troops. The same thing had happened during World War II, before Truman had officially desegregated the armed forces, and a study done on white troops who had gone through that experience showed that they were statistically less racist towards blacks than troops who did not. Commanders with such experience during this Civil War and who saw it didn't lead to chaos within the ranks could make the case for practicality: It makes little sense to have two militias with two staffs, one likely to be significantly larger than the other depending on whether whites or blacks are the local majority.

 

[Ficboy]

Hey Red_Galiray, Just add a colon to the title of your timeline. It should read Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War.

 

[NauvooLegion86]

Hey Red_Galiray, Just add a colon to the title of your timeline. It should read Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War.

I don't know if he changed it in between the two hours in which you posted this and I saw this comment, but as of <whatever time it is where you are right now> the title does indeed have a colon.

 

[Red_Galiray]

I don't know if he changed it in between the two hours in which you posted this and I saw this comment, but as of <whatever time it is where you are right now> the title does indeed have a colon.

I changed it after seeing his comment, yes. @Ficboy is right that it does look somewhat more professional. I intend to change the chapter titles in the future as well.

 

[Ficboy]

I changed it after seeing his comment, yes. @Ficboy is right that it does look somewhat more professional. I intend to change the chapter titles in the future as well.

The chapter titles are fine as is.

 

[Red_Galiray]

The chapter titles are fine as is.

The grammar, I meant. To follow the style of capitalizing most words.

 

[Ficboy]

The grammar, I meant. To follow the style of capitalizing most words.

Okay.

 

[Ficboy]

@Red_Galiray Just capitalize the title on your very first post of this timeline.

 

[Jack Doe Obviously]

illegal by international law

What international law. The south was never a legitimate nation. This was one of the causes of the war.

In the face of a depressed and generationally stunted voting base, I don't think it's too hard to get a reactionary white feminism to try an offset the losses from the war.

I mean I'm not even sure it would be comparable to modern feminism. It might be very alien.

It'd also be interesting (and also very appropriate) for there to be an even earlier butting of heads with regard to Universal White Suffrage vs Universal Male Suffrage. It ought not to be that way, of course, but I think it's fitting for the times.

If universal male suffrage is instituted it will might mean that there are a disproportionate number of black male voters in the south leading to the call for universal suffrage by white women to increase the ratio of white to black votes.

They do, however, have slavery. And as noted above, photography. And maybe, with enough effort, it can be a start.

It's more than enough.

You could argue that rapes, murders, and re-enslavement which happened after the emancipation proclamation was a clear violation of the law.

This is the route to go down.

Not that I think it is necessary to really need an excuse to hang a bunch of rapists.

There's what we want and then there's what's practicable and needed to maintain precedent.

In regards to Reconstruction, would it perhaps be plausable to have Mixed Militias, which have both Freed Blacks and Southern Unionists/Poor Non-slave Owners?

This is an interesting idea. It also gives me another idea. What about instead of just redistributing the planter estates to souther blacks also give large swathes to the families of poor southern whites who were conscripted against their will and died. Thats how you cement interracial support.

 

[MarshalofMontival]

What about instead of just redistributing the planter estates to souther blacks also give large swathes to the families of poor southern whites who were conscripted against their will and died. Thats how you cement interracial support.

Breaking up the plantations into independent farms could definitely work. Legally speaking, you could argue that as the land was owned by traitors, it's now forfeit to the government, who in a gesture of charity and conciliation is redistributing it to any poor farmer who's willing to keep the peace and obey the new laws. Make the ownership of those farms contingent on that willingness and service in a mixed militia company (which should probably be mandated to either have an even split between black and white officers or promotion on strict merit overseen by the Army) and you have the stick to go with the carrot.

 

[Triune Kingdom]

In regards to the postwar Militia, while rank and file, and perhaps even the NCOs, could and should be both Black and White, I do think that having Black officers is simply too far at the moment. Still, a mixed Militia, if officered by White officers would help a lot, as it could be seen by many of the Southerners as a much less of a chance for Freed Blacks to exact vengeance upon them.

Also, what would be very helpful, is to perhaps have some of the ex-Confederate officers to take a prominent role in the Reconstruction, either in civilian or military capacity. It would be very hard to see Black Militia as an existential threat, if they are commanded by an officer who is known to have served Confederacy, and it may really help reduce the chances of outright fighting erupting.

 

[DTF955Baseballfan]

What international law. The south was never a legitimate nation. This was one of the causes of the war.

International law has been cited to charge people with crimes against humanity when disgusting things are done in a nation's internal affairs OTL, but I'll grant you that these are much closer to the present and there needs to be some precedent built up. As of the 1860s, countries are just starting to discuss how enemy soldiers should be treated, so perhaps a different term should be used for abuse of civilians to convince other nations to sign off on any treaty banning human bondage, human trafficking, etc. worldwide.

Edit: Though Wikipedia says the term is used to apply to the Geneva Convention (and thus for soldiers at this point in history), perhaps in an ironic twist Humanitarian Law could be considered TTL as an appropriate term for such things.

 

[Zek Sora]

What international law. The south was never a legitimate nation. This was one of the causes of the war.

No, but they were recognized as a belligerent power (if not an independent nation) by most of the international community during the war, and some aspects of international law do apply to belligerent powers.

 

[FickleCrossroad]

No, but they were recognized as a belligerent power (if not an independent nation) by most of the international community during the war, and some aspects of international law do apply to belligerent powers.

International law is whatever the victors want it to be.

You can get away with whatever you want as long as you win.