Opinion | America Punishes Only a Certain Kind of Rebel – The New York Times

Before he died, Davis wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, a two-volume work in which he purported to show that the Southern states had rightfully the power to withdraw from a Union into which they had, as sovereign communities, voluntarily entered and that secession was a righteous response to violations and usurpations of the Constitution.

Stephens similarly sought vindication with a book that framed the Civil War as a fight over opposing principles that lay in the organic structure of the government of the states. It was strife, he wrote, between the principles of federation, on the one side, and centralism, or consolidation, on the other.

Leniency for defeated Confederates did not just give them an opportunity to shape the nations memory of the war; it also contributed to a climate of impunity that fueled violence against Black people and their allies. Contemporary observers blamed the New Orleans massacre of 1866 in which a mob of white rioters attacked a group of mostly Black Unionists, leaving dozens dead and many more wounded on Johnsons permissive Reconstruction policies.

Blood is upon his hands, the blood of innocent, loyal citizens, who had committed no crime but that of seeking to protect themselves against rebel misrule, which he, Andrew Johnson, had foisted upon them, The Chicago Tribune wrote.

To explain Johnsons leniency, the historian Eric Foner notes two factors. The first was Johnsons deep-seated racism, his belief that white men alone must manage the South. The second was his ambition to serve a second term. Thus, as Foner writes in Reconstruction: Americas Unfinished Revolution, Johnson came to view cooperation with the former Confederate elite as indispensable to two interrelated goals white supremacy in the South and his own re-election as president.

Put a little differently, Johnsons willingness to hold former Confederates responsible was tempered by both ideology and the realities of partisan politics. The Southern planter class may have been disloyal, but it still represented the kind of citizen Johnson believed should rule, as well as the kind of voter he hoped to attract.

This is an important point. The United States has never struggled to punish those radicals who stood against hierarchy and domination. Whether you were a labor radical, Black revolutionary or left-wing militant, to attempt to upset existing class and social relations or, at times, to even associate with people who held those ideas was to court state repression. The two Red Scares of the 20th century are evidence enough of this fact.

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Opinion | America Punishes Only a Certain Kind of Rebel - The New York Times