THE CONVENIENT LIE: The Verdict That Was Never Earned
Part Six of Mindy Esposito's Great Series. (Almost Done)
Part Six of Mindy Esposito’s Great Series. (Almost Done)
(Mindy Esposito) - The South surrendered in April 1865. It did not receive peace. It received a verdict.
Guilty of treason. Guilty of slavery. Guilty of rebellion. Guilty of everything that followed. No trial. No hearing. No accounting for the broken compact or the thirty years of economic extraction or the constitutional argument Jefferson and Madison had established. Just a verdict. Handed down by the victors. Enforced for a hundred and sixty years.
This essay is about what that verdict cost. Not just the South. Everyone.
THE TERMS THAT WERE NOT HONORED
Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Grant’s terms were generous. Go home. Keep your horses. Officers keep their sidearms. Parole and no prosecution. The men who had fought for four years were to be treated as Americans again, not as criminals or conquered subjects.
Lincoln wanted malice toward none. He said so in his second inaugural address four weeks before Appomattox. With malice toward none, with charity for all. He meant it. He had spent the final months of the war thinking about reconciliation, about binding…