Crime & Punishment

PETER: For the rest of the hour today, we’ve got a show we’re calling, the United States of Uncertainty. We’re picking up where Appomattox leaves off, and considering that wasn’t clear in the spring, summer, and fall of 1865. We’ll look at what the end of the word meant for former slaves, suddenly able to put together the pieces of their broken families.

And for the Union troops, tasked with enforcing emancipation in the face of resistance by white southerners. We’ll also play an excerpt of our recent live performance at the 150th Anniversary of the fall Confederate Richmond.

BRIAN: But first, we’re going to play the tape forward from Appomattox, and look at what happened to the leaders of the losing side. President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet had fled Richmond when their capital city fell to federal troops a few days earlier. For the next month, he and his still acting government moved from city to city, in an attempt to evade capture.

Union troops finally caught up with Davis on May 10th in the tiny town of Irwinville, Georgia. He was taken to Fortress Monroe on the Virginia coast to await trial for treason against the US Government. But Davis wasn’t actually put on trial in 1865, or the year after.

It turns out that he was released after only two years imprisonment on $100,000 bail. And believe it or not, that was the most severe punishment that any of the top Confederate leadership faced in the aftermath of the war. I sat down with historian David Blight to talk about what happened to some of the other rebel leaders.

DAVID BLIGHT: Well, first of all, Robert E. Lee was put under a kind of house arrest in Richmond. Now that really didn’t amount to much. He went home, he went to Richmond–

BRIAN: Right, we know he walks out of Appomattox.

DAVID BLIGHT: He rode his horse out of Appomattox, in effect, a free man, except for the fact that he did have his citizenship stripped. But Lee was free to travel within the state of Virginia. And though declared not a citizen, he had– in virtually every other way– the rights of any other American.

Lee, of course, will only live until 1870. But he will live long enough to begin some gatherings and meetings and reunions of his surviving lieutenants, his surviving officers and generals. And he will begin to, first quietly, and then fairly openly, lead at least a kind of Confederate officers’ effort to denounce reconstruction policies.

A good number of ex-Confederate, especially in the army– possibly as many as 6,000– fled the country. And particularly in Brazil, a lot of ex-Confederate went and settled, hoping they could reestablish a kind of plantation slave owning life. A fair number of those who went into self exile eventually will come back to the US.

A famous example is Jubal Early, one of Lee’s key generals. Early first fled to Canada, then to Mexico, believing he was going to be– many of these fled, by the way, believing they were going to be arrested, tried, and executed for treason. They had every reason to believe, in a rational way, that that’s what was going to happen.

When Early realized in, I think, 1866 that that wasn’t going to happen, he came back to the South, took up residence in his hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia, and he would become one of the staunchest advocates of the lost cause tradition.

BRIAN: And the other members of the governments? Were they charged with anything? Did anything happen to them?

DAVID BLIGHT: Alexander H. Stevens, who was the Confederate vice president, was also arrested and taken to Boston, and imprisoned–

BRIAN: The ultimate punishment for a Confederate.

DAVID BLIGHT: Yes, that’s right. I think he was put in the Charlestown jail for about five months, from May to October. And he, too, was to be charged with the same things, of treason, rebellion, against the United States Government, and so forth. But he was released, ordered released by Andrew Johnson, the then president, as an act of reconciliation of some kind toward the South.

And he simply went back as a free citizen, all the way to his home state of Georgia.

BRIAN: So all of these government officials, did they have to seek individual pardons from Andrew Johnson?

DAVID BLIGHT: Yes.

BRIAN: Is that how they were allowed to simply go on with their business, so to speak?

DAVID BLIGHT: Well, Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, is a key player in this– particularly the first year or two after the war– in who gets punished, or if anyone gets punished. Initially, when he took office, he announced very publicly, in a phrase no one ever forgot, he said, “treason must be made odious.”

Now, exactly what he meant by that, no one quite knew. Turns out he didn’t really mean it, and in the summer of 1865 and into the fall of 1865, Johnson– who was from east Tennessee– offered presidential pardons to ex-Confederates, if, particularly, they came to Washington to request them. And he set up a small bureaucracy to adjudicate, or to administer, these pardons.

The only distinction he put into that process is that anyone who owned $20,000 worth of property or more had to personally apply to the president himself. Now that was Johnson’s old personal contempt or scorn for the planter class of the South, which he was not part of. And he blamed, in many ways, that kind of planter elite of the cotton kingdom for secession, and for the war.

And he started issuing, first, pardons by the dozens, then pardons by the hundreds, and eventually pardons by the thousands, to ex-Confederates.

BRIAN: David, I’m just baffled by this, as a 20th century historian. There’s so many moments– one could argue, the majority of the 20th century– where simply hinting at overthrowing the government would get you slammed in jail.

DAVID BLIGHT: At least.

PETER: Yet here are people who fought the Union, seceded from the Union, armed rebellion– obviously, hundreds of thousands of men killed. And nothing, nothing happens to them whatsoever. How do you explain that?

DAVID BLIGHT: Well, it’s difficult to explain, except that we need to step back again to Lincoln’s leadership. It was basically Lincoln’s vision that reconstruction, when it came– and of course, they had debated this richly during the war for two years– when the war ended, and when it was possible to reconstruct the Southern states, and re-admit them to the Union, Lincoln wanted it to be as rapid as possible.

He wanted lenient terms. He wanted a quick surrender. He wanted surrenders that would not allow the war to result in guerrilla war. The Union leadership– really quite a ways down the line, this wasn’t just Lincoln– the last thing they wanted were hundreds of bands of Confederate troops operating as irregular guerrillas, going up into the Appalachian Mountains, or going into the upcountry of Georgia, or going into the hinterland of Arkansas, or going into east Texas– these bands that could be there for months, if not years, which would mean the Civil War would not have had a distinctive end, and it might have had an even bloodier kind of end in local areas.

BRIAN: And was it generally acknowledged that the reason for such leniency was just that? That it was the quickest way to bring at least the overt military fighting to an end?

DAVID BLIGHT: Yes, it was. And there was the assumption– let’s also remember, there’s no blueprint for. This country, nor any other, had ever quite done this after a massive civil war. So they don’t have a blueprint for this. What they do know is those Southern states can’t go anywhere. They have to come back into the Union. They have to be reunited on some basis.

And I mean, that’s not just because they saw Southerners as fellow Americans and all of that. There is that story out there, all over the literature. There are books like this, that claim that the surrender at Appomattox and surrenders to follow were just part of this American genius for leniency and compromise and healing. I don’t buy that at all.

I think it was more a realpolitik set of judgments that said, look, we have to put the Union back together. If we carry out a large number of treason trials and executions, this thing might just never end.

BRIAN: David Blight is a historian at Yale University. His new biography of Frederick Douglass is due out later this year. Earlier in the show, we heard from Elizabeth Varon, a historian at the University of Virginia, and author of Appomattox– Victory, Defeat and Freedom at the End of the Civil War.