How to end a civil war: Part 1

In the period 1861 through 1865, two regions of the United States fought a very bloody civil war. The two regions that fought each had a very distinct culture and different dominant religions, and deep and seemingly irreconcilable differences. Then came the military defeat of one region -- the South -- in 1865, after Sherman's army ripped the guts out of the Southern economy and rendered the South incapable of feeding its armies, at which point its armies disintegrated.

And thus the war was over. Or was it? Abraham Lincoln certainly was concerned that it wasn't, as was General U.S. Grant and General W.T. Sherman, both of whom took steps to reduce the possibility of continued guerrilla warfare. Unfortunately, Lincoln got assassinated and his Vice President, a genial plantation owner from Tennessee, was incapable of dealing with the virulent hatred of Northerners who wished to collectively punish the South for their treason of rebelling against the central government.

So they did. They put President Jefferson Davis of the South into jail as a traitor. They considered bringing up various Southern generals up on charges of treason (at which point they would be hanged). They imposed military rule on the South and stripped the South of all representation in Congress. Despite the fact that General Sherman had destroyed a year's crops for the South and thus they had no food, there was no attempt to feed the hungry Southerners who were literally starving in their fields.

The results: If you go to any town or city in the South today that existed in 1865, you will find a plaque. This plaque says something along the lines of, "Here was fought the Battle of Coushatta, May 5, 1871." Or "Here was fought the Battle of Jackson Square, August 5, 1874".

Now I hear you say, "Hold it, wasn't the American Civil War over in 1865?". No. The American Civil War actually was not over until 1877, with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise that removed military occupation from the South and finished the job of pardoning the last remaining Confederate prisoners. Until then, the former Confederates fought a very effective guerrilla war -- not against Union troops (they didn't want General Sherman turned loose to burn all their farms down again, after all), but against the organs of civil government installed by those Union troops. This was a bloody, violent effort that occurred wherever the Union troops weren't. But once the former Confederates were allowed to resume their positions of power (after promising to pretend that the South was part of the United States and promising to pretend that slavery was over), that was the end of the violence. The hatred was still there -- 100 years later, when I was born, native Southerners would still spit at the mention of the name "General Sherman", talk about "damned Yankees", and whine that Abraham Lincoln was "a tyrant who illegally stole our property[slaves] from us". But the violence was over.

So, what lessons can we learn from this? I think these lessons are pretty clear:

1. Collective punishment does not work. As long as the North imposed collective punishment against the South, there was violence against Northern interests in the South. Undoubtedly if other Northern targets had existed within firing range of the South they would have been targets of violence too.
2. The right to vote and be represented in the national government eliminates violence. Once the South was allowed (by the Hayes-Tilden Compromise) to install its own legislators in the national government, violence stopped literally overnight, because violence would have threatened the power that the newly-elected legislators had won.
3. This participation in the national government cannot be a token participation. The newly-elected legislators had real power in the U.S. Congress, especially in the Senate, where any Senator could filibuster and stop legislation that would adversely impact the South. If not given real power via the political process, they would have continued attempting to achieve real power via force of arms.
4. All "war criminals", "traitors", and "terrorists" must be pardoned and allowed to participate fully in government.. It took ten years of sticking in the craw of Northerners for them to do this, but finally they realized that as long as the right to vote and the right to hold office was denied to former Confederate leaders, there would continue to be unrest in the South. This despite the fact that the former Confederate leaders were clearly traitors who had taken up arms against their lawful government under the terms of the Constitution and thus the proper response as laid out in the Constitution would have been to hang them all. But it was realized that hanging the former Confederate leadership would cause more problems, because each former Confederate leader had friends and family would would thus be even more embittered and motivated to take up arms against the federal government.
5. Most people just want to live a normal life. This is the hardest thing for some people to understand. The average Southerner had no desire to take up arms and "kill Damnyankees". It was only while they were under military occupation, half-starved, not allowed to participate in their usual professions, living abnormal lives where they had no say in their governance, that they were willing to do this. Once the occupation was over and they could live normal lives, they just lived their lives and anybody who dared try violence against the "damnyankees" was ostracized and reported to the proper authorities, who, because of the above, were happy to hang'em from the nearest tree (because violence against the "damnyankees" threatened their own power).
6. Blame is not useful. The first thing that happens when I go into a company to rescue a failing product is that I get everybody in a room who has done work on the product, sit back, and listen. Inevitably, they start blaming one another for the failure to produce a working product. About fifteen minutes after this starts, I lean forward, and at the first breath where I can get a word in sideways say, "You know, I'm getting bored. I don't care who's to blame. I want to know how to fix this. I need to know what we need to do to get a product out the door, and then we need to walk out of this room and do it." And then keep shutting them down every time they start pointing fingers at one another rather than telling me what we need to do to get this product out the door. The North and the South were quick to blame the other for the American Civil War. Heck, even today it's called "The War of Northern Aggression" in some parts of the South, and the "War of Southern Treason" in some parts of the North. But paying any attention to that is completely useless when trying to solve the problem of how to stitch a nation together from two seemingly hostile and irreconcilable populations.

Now, the next step is to see how this applies to the Palestinian-Israeli Civil War. What? The Palestinian-Israeli Civil War? I bet you never knew such a thing existed! Well, you'll just have to wait to see what I mean, eh?

-- Badtux the History Penguin

A sad post-script: The abandonment of the South's black population in 1877 is commonly condemned by contemporary dilettantes. Sadly, widespread racism and discrimination against black Americans is pretty much a side note to the post-Civil War history of the United States until the 1950's because discrimination against black Americans was not a Southern thing alone, but happened throughout the nation (the bastion of the KKK hate group was not the South, but... Indiana, a Northern farm state which doesn't even *have* many blacks). Ending strife and the death and killing does not, alas, somehow cure racism. All it does is give the opportunity for descendants of current racists to change their mind.