A review of
With Malice Toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era by William A. Blair (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) and
Secession on Trial: The Treason Prosecution of Jefferson Davis by Cynthia Nicoletti (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Was the act of secession in 1860-61 treason? This is one of the more
important and lasting questions of the War. If so, then the lenient
treatment of Confederate officers, political figures, and even the
soldiers themselves following the War was a great gesture of magnanimity
by a conquering foe never seen in the annals of Western Civilization.
If not, then the entire War was an illegal and unconstitutional invasion
of a foreign government with the express objective of maintaining a
political community by force, an act that represented the antithesis of
the American belief in self-government regardless of Abraham Lincoln’s
professed admiration for government “of the people, by the people, and
for the people.”
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