Daily Times

The beginning of the week marked the 160th anniversary of the start of the American Cvil War. Violence erupted when Confederate forces opened-fire on Fort Sumter, a sea port built on an artificial island in Charleston in the Deep South. The initial death toll for 1861-1865 was put at 620,000 soldiers; including those who died during combat or from accident, starvation and disease. More recent estimates however, claim that this figure is closer to 850,000.

America’s wounds from this period have yet to heal, as highlighted by the current debate over reparations for the descendants of slaves, including the four million who were freed at the end of the Civil War when the Confederacy collapsed. Indeed, US lawmakers are currently moving towards legislating on this question. Last July, America’s top military soldier, General Mark A Milley, emphatically termed Confederate soldiers traitors who were guilty of treason. At the beginning of this year, a new federal law was introduced that requires West Point — the US Military Academy — to rename structures and roads honouring Confederate generals. This includes Lee Barracks, named after Robert E Lee, the commander of the Confederate States Army during the Civil War.

The New York Times accused Lee of treason in its editorial on June 4, 1865: “He has ‘levied war against the United States’ more strenuously than any other man in the land, and thereby has been specially guilty of the crime of treason, as defined in the Constitution of the United States,” and “whether Gen Lee should be hung or not, is a minor question.”

President Andrew Johnson, who assumed office following President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, agreed with The New York Times and supported strict punishment for Lee and his generals. Interestingly, Johnson ran afoul of the North’s war hero, Gen Ulysses S Grant (who led the Union Army to victory). The latter, at the Appomattox Court House, agreed to favourable terms of surrender for the Confederates, in a bid to bring the Civil War to an end. He pledged that “each officer and man will be allowed to return to his home, not to be disturbed by United States Authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside.” Grant, who supported enduring peace, included this line to ensure immunity from any reprisals against the Confederates.

Will we ever be able to resolve the horrors of 1861-65? A truly civilised nation could. Can we?

It was not to last. For on June 7, 1865 Judge John Curtiss Underwood, a federal judge presiding over the District Court in Virginia, indicted Lee and others for treason on the grounds that the terms of parole agreed upon were “a mere military arrangement, and can have no influence upon civil rights or the status of the persons interested”. Lee then wrote to Grant, seeking amnesty.

Nine days later, in response to Lee’s request, Ulysses S Grant wrote the following to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton:

“In my opinion the officers and men paroled at Appomattox Court-House, and since, upon the same terms given to Lee, cannot be tried for treason so long as they observe the terms of their parole. This is my understanding. Good faith, as well as true policy, dictates that we should observe the conditions of that convention. Bad faith on the part of the Government, or a construction of that convention subjecting the officers to trial for treason, would produce a feeling of insecurity in the minds of all the paroled officers and men. If so disposed they might even regard such an infraction of terms by the Government as an entire release from all obligations on their part. I will state further that the terms granted by me met with the hearty approval of the President at the time, and of the country generally. The action of Judge Underwood, in Norfolk, has already had an injurious effect, and I would ask that he be ordered to quash all indictments found against paroled prisoners of war, and to desist from further prosecution of them.”

One wonders what Grant would say if he were alive today? Undoubtedly, he would face ideological opposition from much of the current crop of generals. One also cannot help but wonder whether in today’s hyper-charged and polarised political environment — any minds would be open to change.

Slavery was, without a doubt, a crime against a humanity. Yet the question remains as to whether we will ever be able to resolve the horrors of the Civil War. A truly civilised nation could. Can we?

Dr. Harlan Ullman is Senior Advisor at Washington, DC’s Atlantic Council. His latest book, The Fifth Horseman and the New MAD: The Tragic History of How Massive Attacks of Disruption Are Endangering, Infecting, Engulfing and Disuniting a 51% Nation due to be out late this year describes the 1923 Fund in greater detail