[Sopater]

No, they were patriots.

[bigdaddy45]

If you try to secede and lead a successful revolution, then you are a patriot. If you lose, you are a traitor. The winners write history. Thats just how it works.

[grobdriver]

"the people of the East cannot reconcile their habits, views, and interests with those of the South and West."

Some things never change...

[onedoug]

Which ones were tried as traitors? AFAIK, none.

[freedomjusticeruleoflaw]

The North’s battle cry- “Union.”
The South’s battle cry- “Freedom.”
Nuff said.

[Dixie Yooper]

I believe their pardons were worked out in the terms of surrender. Except maybe for Mosby and his Raiders.

[doorgunner69]

I am not a Southerner, but I never thought of the Confederate states as "rebel", nor the leaders traitors.

I look at the northeast states now and it is easy to see why the South wanted to be done with them, so do I. They were just a bit ahead of the times.

[central_va]

I thought all of this historical fact was common knowledge and made common sense. It is a shame that this needs to be written.

[Timpanagos1]

Those who fired upon Fort Sumter may have had a problem.

[ifinnegan]

Southrons!

Lol.

I remember when the morons infiltrated here and called themselves Southrons.

[DoodleDawg]

Article 1 of the Treaty of Paris (1783), which ended the war between the Colonies and Great Britain, held "New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and Independent States." Representatives of these states came together in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a constitution and form a union.

The Treaty of Paris also said it was between two countries, not thirteen.

[ifinnegan]

Anyhow.

They was Dems.

Dems is always traitors.

[morphing libertarian]

Traitors by definition, became the enemy of the US.

[Luircin]

No matter what they did, one side would have called them traitors.

That, unfortunately, is how civil war works.

Far as I can tell, there were good and bad points about both sides of the war. They both had some good and bad arguments about the rightness of their cause.

To demonize one side or the other is to willfully ignore the lessons of history.

[Salman]

I won't argue the point, but as a Yankee I have no trouble stipulating that they were traitors.

That said, they lost real bad and I am so-o-o-o-o-o over it.

Not even a little bit of temptation to desecrate their graves. I'm just not that kind of guy.

[Alcibiades]

They defended their homeland from invasion by a foreign power.

Hence the war’s proper name: The War of Northern Aggression.

[freedomfiter2]

That would be Lincoln and his numerous unconstitutional acts.

[Still Thinking]

The U.S. Constitution would have never been ratified — and a union never created — if the people of those 13 "free sovereign and Independent States" did not believe that they had the right to secede. Even on the eve of the War of 1861, unionist politicians saw secession as a right that states had. Rep. Jacob M. Kunkel of Maryland said, "Any attempt to preserve the union between the states of this Confederacy by force would be impractical and destructive of republican liberty." The Northern Democratic and Republican parties favored allowing the South to secede in peace.

Exactly. If entry was voluntary, then it would be assumed that staying was voluntary.

[Calvin Cooledge]

Robert E. Lee was not a traitor. He did not conspire with a foreign enemy to betray the United States. Nor did he seek to overthrow the Federal government. The southern states left the union, and merely wanted to be a separate nation. They did not even want to conquer or vanquish the North.

And an interesting fact about branding Lee a traitor. Congress wanted to arrest Lee. But Grant told them they would have to go through him and the Union Army if they tried to get to Lee.

[WMarshal]

I don’t believe that you can call them traitors because they were being loyal to their state. In those days Americans’ allegiance was primarily to the state they lived in and were born in than to America as a whole. Most Americans don’t realize that at the time of the Civil War people were citizens of their state as if it was its own country. In those days politics was truly local.

[sphinx]

Victors of wars get to write the history, and the history they write often does not reflect the facts.

The victors did write the history. Or most of it. And more to the point, the victors defined the terms of the peace. After the Civil War, "the victors" could have gone either way, and their choice was hotly debated. There were those who wanted hangings and retribution. The peace and reconciliation faction won out -- remarkably, after Lincoln's assassination. Reconciliation was complex, and it involved a mutual understanding that the former enemies would honor the valor and sacrifice of the soldiers on both sides. They sacramentalized the war and agreed to remember it as a shared tragedy.

150 years later, leftists want to tear down the memorials, desecrate the graves, reopen the wounds and rub them with salt -- not to eradicate vestiges of white supremacy, which is long gone, but to strip American history of its mythic, unifying and ennobling themes, of which the tragedy of the Civil War is an important element. And because they see short term political advantage in inflaming racial hatred, which is to be manipulated for partisan purposes.