Racists were given everything they needed for their insurrection to live on and return. Jan 6 was a direct result of not hanging the leaders of the confederacy, allowing them to recast themselves as plucky underdogs, and letting the losers (maybe for the first time in history that I can think of) to write the history.

I have a coworker with a history degree from the UW who confidently asserts that the civil war was about states rights and not slavery. That should not be possible.

You cannot let traitors to a republic reclaim the powers and privileges in the society they betrayed. No actively serving Confederate should have held any elected position thereafter. At least some should have hanged for treason and crimes against humanity.

And most of all perhaps, we should not have explicitly enshrined SLAVERY IN THE CONSTITUTION AS A GIFT TO THEM ON THEIR LOSING THE WAR. Slavery continues to this day thanks to the 13th amendment because our victorious union was still a bunch of myopic racist idiots who couldn't face the truth of slavery's inherent evil.

So now we have a US with confederate sympathisers running the government who actively want to subjugate you. They grew up believing enemy propaganda, they have the legal means to criminalise you, and enact slavery upon you for it. Over a century later, the ghosts of unhung traitors are killing again.

We can argue about what the exact proper punishments should have been, fine - but we should agree that the intended effect of those punishments would have looked like NOT LOSING THE CIVIL WAR almost 160 years after we won it. Okay?