• BashfulBob [none/use name]
    ·
    2 months ago

    it's not like the Southerners faced many real consequences for losing the Civil War.

    Hundreds of thousands dead and more maimed or blinded or traumatized for life, enormous economic carnage (not talking slavery just all the physical capital that was obliterated by strategic necessity), and the looting of state treasuries by every form of unscrupulous war monger?

    War is always awful. Civil War is the worst kind of awful. That the confederates managed to reconstitute as a rump political force inside a generation didn't spare the Southern States from underdevelopment, exploitation, and grinding poverty for the next 180 years. If anything, the endless doubling down on a dream of insurgency just exacerbated their miserable state.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
      ·
      2 months ago

      Hundreds of thousands dead and more maimed or blinded or traumatized for life, enormous economic carnage (not talking slavery just all the physical capital that was obliterated by strategic necessity), and the looting of state treasuries by every form of unscrupulous war monger?

      Few of the slave owners were the ones that fought and died. Those were poor whites almost exclusively. The plantation owners were absolutely fine.

      That the confederates managed to reconstitute as a rump political force inside a generation didn’t spare the Southern States from underdevelopment, exploitation, and grinding poverty for the next 180 years

      Those same former slave owners are the ones that underdeveloped the South so that they could exploit cheap labor and continue superexploitation of Black people.

      The Southern slaver aristocracy should have been executed.

      • BashfulBob [none/use name]
        ·
        2 months ago

        Few of the slave owners were the ones that fought and died. Those were poor whites almost exclusively.

        Plenty of Confederate Junior officers came from the planter class and got killed in the fighting.

        The Southern slaver aristocracy should have been executed.

        At a minimum, lands stripped and distributed to the people, certainly. Although, there would have been a certain special irony if Lee had been hung at Charles Town, Virginia on Dec 2, 1865.