Reply #80: Actually, you're technically incorrect. Various Confederate

[coalition_unwilling]

officials, like the commandant of the Andersonville prison camp, were tried after the war (albeit not for treason).

You don't consider it "treason" to fire on a facility owned and operated by the U.S. government? (I'm referring, of course, to Fort Sumter.) If so, then exactly how do you define "treason"?

As for the general lack of war crimes trials after 1865, I chalk most of that up to the heritage of Abraham Lincoln who, even after he died, managed to rein in the most strident of the "radical Republicans."

One of my favorite sayings by Lincoln: "The best way to get rid of an enemy is to make him a friend." Those words seem especially appropriate today.

The point about the legitimacy of Southern secession is that its nominal support by segments of Southern white males was not the result of universal manhood suffrage by any stretch of the imagination.