One of our greatest mistakes after the Civil War was...
letting Southern slaveowners and revolutionaries off with a slap on the wrist. They should have been ground into the dust of history, rather than been celebrated as misled heros.
After WW2, the Allies, and many Gernans, understood that all vestiges of naziism had to be surprrssed. The Hitler salute, swastika, ss uniforms, etc all were illegal in very short order. Any support of Nazis or Holocaust denial was immediately put down. Germans, with our support, were almost as ruthless stamping it out as they were once in supporting it.
Thing is, there were still millions of Nazis in Germany and around the world, claiming theat they had a right to their views. They soon found out that they didn't. But it is a hell of whack a mole game trying to shut them up.
Here in the US, we never even tried. Whatever the fuck is a statue of Lee doing at West Point?
And so many of those statues were raised in the 1930s as a sop to the racist scumbags of the time. If we had properly ground them to dust after the civil war, we wouldn't have eliminated them, but we would have made current problems easier to deal with.
So, start the grinding now. There is no legal protection for any bloodthirsty asshole threatening a judge or properly elected politician.
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It resulted in the United States federal government pulling the last troops out of the Southern United States, and ending the Reconstruction Era.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877
Rather than giving 40 acres to Freedmen as planned, he returned the land to the Southern owners so that they would "owe" him - and treat him with "respect." And this country has been paying for this failure ever since. 
Mary Trump also emphasizes this in her second book, plus the failure of Reconstruction (thanks to Andrew Johnson) is responsible for many of the inequality issues we are still dealing with today. 
Last edited Thu Sep 1, 2022, 11:01 AM - Edit history (1)
as the far right would do, destroy defeated opponents without concern for the inevitable fallout and enormous costs to every aspect of society -- not just the southern economy but to The People. The consequences of large troubles always come home to the people, and this would have effectively eliminated the governing class needed to cope with the the devastations of war.
Regarding history, 
, so right, but let's throw in the balance that industrialization in the north (but refused in the south) had become a great and growing source of wealth.
The plantation economies were extremely inefficient, producing comparatively little, with almost all wealth concentrated in the hands of a few who wrote the tax laws to benefit themselves. Most free people were very poor by the standards of those days, enslaved people didn't pay taxes, and the South had only a very small middle, taxpaying class in comparison to the north. This was all ended with the war and emancipation.
The Southern wealthy, who despised northern culture and northern manufacturers, insisted on purchasing the goods they couldn't produce on their plantations from overseas -- a significant national wealth drain the federal government attempted to choke off with tariffs and other devices. This was a significant impetus to war and, again, they brought about their own end.
All this means the OP really might be satisfied by the reality that emancipation and the devastations of war did in fact effectively grind the plantation economy and the planters into the dust of history. Also the people of the south, guilty and innocent -- free and newly emancipated, into dust and extreme poverty. The lessons weren't missed just because the leaders weren't the worst affected. The South's reconstruction era, affecting all levels of society, only really ended with the passage of the great liberal civil rights acts of the 1960s-- 100 years of poverty.
Even more, it's hard to see how shooting the leaders then would have changed things today. Certainly not human nature. And the top Republican leaders and people they front for have been very self protective as they go about their revolution anyway. They have others stick their necks out for them. They know they will be protected by the law if they stay within it because their opponents (us!) are battling desperately to preserve it the way we have to: by upholding it.
highly complex, extremely interdependent functions.
In the 1860s the vast majority of of households produced some portion of their own food; even a little made communities much more resilient than the less than a week's supply they have now. All lived within within hauling distance of a sustainable water source (like a stream -- that wouldn't have 100,000 desperate people trampling and pooping in it if other supplies failed) -- not now. And, of course, states too hot and cold and dry to sustain life without 24h HVAC and municipal water were almost empty -- not now.
It'd be incredibly different now. War leaders today would take the services over 300M people depend on for life out in their regions as tools of warfare, but most would be lost as casualties of chaos.
Like losses to fire. What could happen to Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and their exurbs in dry seasons if their fire departments failed to contain a fire, or dozens of fires? Thousands of other communities?
Disease -- with no ability to contain or get vaccines adequately distributed?
As you say. Cooperation to keep our systems going is now more important to survival than everything else.
