A sneaking suspicion

[orangecrush]

I am starting to get the sneaking suspicion the Confederacy was insufficiently punished

— Seth Abramson (@sethabramson.bsky.social) 2026-05-07T23:55:35.758Z

[sheshe2]

1. And the Klan never died.

They were just dormant under the sheets for a bit.

[Buddyzbuddy]

10. And now they're wearing black robes and no hood.

Oh yeah, and they've opened membership to a minority.

[Mr.Bee]

29. The US Supremacy court

[dalton99a]

2. The rebel leaders should have been tried and executed.

[TomSlick]

14. Exactly. Open rebellion is the very definition of treason.

Instead of trying the rebel leaders for treason, they were lionized and allowed to sow the seeds Jim Crow and today's white nationalism.

The US was too quick to "bind up the nation's wounds." Real reconstruction of the rebellious states was made impossible by failing to punish the leaders of the rebellion. The US won the war and lost the peace.

[OldBaldy1701E]

17. Well said! (n/t)

[Hudly]

38. At Nuremberg

Only 11 nazis were executed. In Japanese in was 900. White people get away with almost all their crimes. This bunch will get off too.

[yellow dahlia]

3. Indeed.

With what's going on with gerrymandering - maybe we would be better off w/out the South.

[BeneteauBum]

6. Please don't isolate me! 😊

Peace ☮️

[yellow dahlia]

7. Good point. There are good people below the M-D line.

I am glad to see so many voices standing up in Tennessee and elsewhere.

[relogic]

4. That Confederacy

rose out of the white, European entitlement spawned from colonialism. The founders and our grand experiment was blemished, rotten and riddled with racism, not so easily detected or unveiled fully in those 60 -70 years since that founding. Then, the same ugliness we see now of white entitlement came to a head. A civil war, indeed.

We must punish ourselves today as we must the well-meaning carpenters of independence, though their horror at what they’ve seen created must be enough.

[Dave Id]

5. I've said for years the confederacy didn't lose

they just retreated, then spread their toxic racism throughout the country.

[blubunyip]

24. why do you think

the toxic racism spread? Must have found some fertile ground...

[Exp]

8. Ya think?!?!?!

[dflprincess]

9. We should never have let them back into the union

Should have just treated them as territories like Guam or Puerto Rico.

[IzzaNuDay]

11. Now I am hoping for a secession

Hint to West Coast— let’s get the heck out of here!

[RainCaster]

23. I'd go for that!

Let's take NY & MA as well.
Canada can nationalize Trump's properties, them convert them to serve the needy.

[GiqueCee]

12. Let's boil it down to its essence...

... Confederates were traitors. Celebrating them in any way, shape, or form, can no longer be condoned. It should never have been condoned at all. Ever. But too many slaveholders and their sympathizers in the North let lowlifes lead the way for far, far too long.
My surname is very common in the South. And I've known People of Color that share that name because their ancestors were the property of some of my ancestors. I can never make amends for that obscene travesty; I can only try to live my life better, and give what little I can to make the lives of others a little better.
I'm old. Hell, I don't even buy green bananas, and folks younger than me drop like flies every day, so I harbor no illusions that I'll live long enough to help make the world a better place. I'm just a drop in that bucket, but they say a single drop counts. I will keep trying to count.

[Permanut]

13. Well said, GiqueCee..

I was born and raised in the Northwest, which was not squeaky clean of the stench. The KKK was very active in Oregon in the 20's.

[blubunyip]

25. And hmmm Ohio? Parts of New York even.

etc etc. You can South bash all you want, but toxic racism is everywhere.

Amusing to me how some people in the North want to feel squeaky clean while otherizing "The South."

It's not productive. Especially not considering the other ways the PTB have successfully divided us.

[GiqueCee]

35. I recall reading some years ago...

... that, prior to achieving statehood, Oregon banned People of Color from settling there. Might be apocryphal, I dunno, but the entire nation has a lot to answer for in that regard. It sickens and enrages me that weak, mean people manage to exert such pervasive influence. And for the highest court in the country to be so brazen in their support of these lowlifes is a stain on our dignity as a nation whose greatness was, and is, thanks to immigrants of every melanin hue and belief system.

[moondust]

15. Compromise of 1877

~
During the Reconstruction era of the 1860s and 1870s, the Southern United States fell under federal military oversight. The compromise (of 1877) entailed that Democrats ended both a filibuster of the certified (1876) election results as well as threats of political violence in exchange for the Republicans' ending military oversight. When (Rutherford B.) Hayes took office, he withdrew the last federal troops from the South, which historians largely regard as the end of Reconstruction.
~
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877

[ITAL]

30. Reconstruction was ending either way

Democrats owned Congress and had been starving the military occupation of funding for the previous two years. There were only three states that had "bayonet rule" (as it was termed), as the others had already been given back to local control. Grant had already planned to pull the last troops out of the South anyway, he was just letting his successor figure out how to finally end it (sort of akin the Trump leaving Afghanistan's withdrawal for Biden). Republicans wanted to keep the Senate, and the deal was ALSO focused on that (unmentioned in the wikipedia article) since part of the agreement centered around the new post-Reconstruction Democratic State legislatures delaying replacing their current GOP Senators with Southern Democrats.

[returnee]

16. If only I could rec more than once.

Playing off the inherent flaws in our Constitution, the Lincoln and Johnson administrations failed to adequately punish the remnants of the confederacy thus allowing the inherent sociopathy therein to fester. We now have a situation not unlike leaving an infection in the human body insufficiently treated, leading to resistance to increasingly potent antibiotics. We now appear to have a democracy-resistant fascist infection.

[Rhiannon12866]

19. After the war Robert E. Lee petitioned to have his citizenship restored, but he was not pardoned nor had his

Citizenship restored in his lifetime. But Senator Harry Byrd conducted a 5-year campaign to pardon him, since Lee had signed an oath of allegiance, and it passed, so President Ford signed the bill in 1975.

[SupportSanity]

32. Continuing the tradition of no punishment: President Ford pardoned a president who should've been jailed a long time.

Letting them get away with it they're republicans has been a long tradition.

[orangecrush]

21. Thank you

[lonely bird]

18. They lost the war but

They won the peace.

The “Party of Lincoln™️” abandoned the Black people with the machinations of the election in 1876. Conservatives wanted to do business with the South and that was deemed more important than what happened to the former slaves.

[Susan Calvin]

20. That's not a sneaking suspicion.

That's a fact.

[dalton99a]

22. +1

[Blue Owl]

26. Same with Nazis and Nazism

[Clouds Passing]

27. Especially the Knights of the Golden Circle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Golden_Circle

[Whip-poor-will]

28. Losers

How about a law requiring any confederate statues include a white flag

[Cirsium]

31. It has been a long, long road

Justice Roger B. Taney is notorious for his opinion in the Dred Scott case.

Excerpt:

In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.

It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race, which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted. But the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken.

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.

Full text: https://www.owleyes.org/text/dred-scott-v-sandford/read/opinion-of-the-court#root-58

But the struggle for racial equality and the subsequent white nationalist backlash began long before Taney and continues long after. Taney died in 1864, before Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. A series of decisions — including the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), United States v. Cruikshank (1876), United States v. Reese (1876), and the Civil Rights Cases (1883) — steadily narrowed federal protections for Black citizenship and voting rights.

It was Justice Samuel F. Miller, speaking for the majority in the Slaughter-House Cases of 1873, whose opinion first crippled the 14th Amendment. Then in United States v. Cruikshank (1876), Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite ruled that the protections of the Bill of Rights constrained only the federal government, while the 14th Amendment applied only to state action and not to private acts of racial violence. The decision severely limited the federal government’s ability to protect African Americans from white supremacist terrorism during Reconstruction.

What the Court held was that the protections of the Bill of Rights — specifically in that case the First and Second Amendments — restricted only the federal government, not private individuals or state governments. The Court also held that the 14th Amendment constrained only state action, not the actions of private persons.

That distinction was devastating in practice because the case arose out of the Colfax massacre, where white paramilitaries murdered large numbers of Black citizens in Louisiana during Reconstruction-era political violence. Federal prosecutors had attempted to use the Enforcement Acts to prosecute the attackers. The Court’s narrow interpretation effectively crippled the federal government’s ability to intervene against racial terror carried out by private groups when states refused to protect Black citizens.

United States v. Harris (1883) went further by overturning portions of the Civil Rights Act of 1871. In United States v. Reese (1876) the court ruled that the 15th Amendment did not establish a positive right to vote. This led to the states coming up with clever ways to suppress the votes of African Americans - poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests. In 1883 the court declared the Civil Rights Act to be unconstitutional.

What emerges from that history is not merely “racism” in an abstract sense, but a systematic judicial redefinition of citizenship, federal power, and constitutional enforcement that allowed white supremacist state systems to reassert themselves under formally race-neutral legal doctrines.

Here is a supreme irony. The Trump administration is claiming that the 14th amendment only applied to former slaves. Yet the very first case testing it and weakening it involved a dispute between white meat packing companies. The amendment was unquestionably written in the aftermath of slavery and the American Civil War, with the immediate purpose of protecting the rights of formerly enslaved Black Americans against hostile state governments. But almost immediately, the amendment’s interpretation became entangled in broader questions of corporate rights, federalism, economic regulation, and the scope of national citizenship.

The first major Supreme Court interpretation — The Slaughter-House Cases — did not arise from a direct Black civil-rights claim at all. It arose from a dispute involving white butchers and meatpacking interests in New Orleans challenging a state-created slaughterhouse monopoly. An amendment created to secure the citizenship and rights of formerly enslaved people was first narrowed dramatically in a case centered on economic competition among white businessmen.

[CharleyDog]

33. "What are you talking about??" -signed, John Birch. nt

[FakeNoose]

34. Agreed! Now let's talk about Richard Nixon and the Watergate cover-up ...

... and then we can move onto Chump's coup attempt on January 6th, 2021.

Also there were a couple other things with Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney and Shrub ... but they can wait.

[themaguffin]

36. Yep

[efhmc]

37. There is a true story in my family about how my mom saw a klan robe in her best friend's father's closet. She told her

parents and was never allowed to go there again. Not the deepest of the south but still deep Texas. My mom also got in trouble with one gmother for whistling "Dixie".