1) Tens of thousands of extra-judicial executions?
Yeah. I don't know where that's coming from, either. I think that's an exaggeration (without making light of the killings that did occur).
I don't think there'd be much bushwacking on the West Coast, SW, NW, Midwest, NE, and Great Lakes regions. An "utterly failed state" conjures up the image of Somalia. As to the Deep South, if the South in general does this, the paradigm changes, and brings the full wrath of the North. If the South does not even give the semblance of co-operation, then its the most extreme outcome for Reconstruction after all.
I think I see where he's going on this. It would be a qualified "failed state." An analogy might be British rule in Ireland, which certainly by the early 20th century had become a failed state within a state, even if the United Kingdom remained a successful nation-state and great power otherwise. Southern Sudan leaps to mind. Other examples could be found.
But it would take positive, harsh measures by the North to bring that about in the first place, and there wasn't the stomach for that in the North in the spring and summer of 1865, especially after the wave of anger over Lincoln's assassination simmered back down. To make this personal, my ancestors (the ones already here) all fought for the Union, and at least a few were anti-slavery agitators. Reading through their correspondence at war's end, the ones who had survived just wanted to get back home and get the farms and businesses back up and running. The ones back home just wanted them back home. Most people were worn out. Nearly 400,000 boys in blue didn't come home, and lots of others came home sans limbs. It's hard to see how you sustain the political support for a massive long-term occupation, especially one that results in a smattering of War Department condolences going back home.
He had the means to enable the prisoners to go on work parties to chop down trees to provide lumber for shelter,
but he refused. He had the means to allow prisoners, slaves, even his own guards to collect safe drinking water upstream from the very river that ran right through the middle if the camp,
but he refused. He had the offers from local farmers, that they wished to send food to the prisoners (it was a bumper crop in 1864, as Sherman's boys found to their delight),
BUT HE REFUSED.
It was the deliberate policy of Seddon's to deliberately starve Union PoWs to the point where they would never be healthy enough to soldier again. While Southern soldiers exchanged were healthy enough to go right back into action. Its hardly any surprise if Union treatment of Southern prisoners got worse as the war went on. Tit-for-tat. As another example, German PoWs in WWII ate as well as GIs, until VE-Day and the death camps were liberated. Within a short time, the German PoWs were on a virtual vegetarian diet.
Saying that Captain Wirz seems not to have been a terribly nice fellow does the greatest injustice to not terribly nice fellows everywhere.
At best, Wirz was a criminally incompetent total bastard. At worst, a genuine war criminal who earned every one of those thirteen steps.
It's just a crying ass shame that Seddon wasn't there to join him in the necktie party.
Setting aside that I am wry understatement sort of fellow, I will confess that I am not much of an expert on Wirz or Andersonville. I'm content to concede that he probably deserved to stretch rope. That said, there was, at the time, evidence that many thought he was a scapegoat, even in the North, and that's sentiment you have to account for and deal with.
I also don't disagree that Seddon (one of the worst of a pretty poor bunch of Confederate cabinet officials*) probably deserved hanging even more - which was, after all, where I was trying to go. The problem is that once you start hanging a Confederate cabinet minister, you've set the precedent that others can be hanged, too, and now it becomes a political exercise, one with political consequences. To take the example of postwar Japan (which had a much worse human rights track record than the CSA, espeically regarding POW's) in 1945-51, there's a consensus now that Hirohito deserved to have stood a war crimes trial, given the standards used in the Japanese war crimes trials. But Hirohito was let off, and he was not the only one let off, because Allied authorities prized stability in the postwar occupation more than they did bringing Hirohito and certain other Japanese leaders to justice. I am not defending letting Hirohito or Seddon walk, by the way; just saying that there was at least an arguable logic at work by U.S. political authorities in each case in deciding to do so.
* One wishes that Davis had been willing to put John C. Breckinridge in at War a whole lot sooner; he would have been a good deal more effective, which risked prolonging the war, but he was also a lot more humane, and much more willing to give up the war once it was obvious it was lost, too. But Davis picked Seddon, and repeatedly stuck by him, and only reluctantly let him go. Davis was, after all, largely his own Secretary of War. In this respect, if Seddon deserves to dance in the air, so does Davis. But we can see now that any desire to execute Davis dissipated pretty rapidly in the North, and not just because they feared making a martyr of him and driving lots of ex-Confederates into the hills.
