It is amazing that the Civil War still causes emotions to run high.
I was a Pro Lincoln, Pro Union person in my youth. Then I started Reading about how “Honest Abe” abused the Bill of Rights and then I started to change course.
Did both sides commit “war crimes”? yeah, most likley. War didnt have a rule book to follow back then, so troops on both sides just followed tradition of rape, pillage and what not. It was done all over the world and was not frowned upon.
We cant use 21st century eyes to view 19th century wars.
Just my opinion...I think the South had a lot more points in their favor and Union folks see the noble cause of abolishing slavery to “OK” everything that was done in its name.
The difference was that the General orders of the day in the Union Army was TO pillage, in the Confederate Army the General Orders were to NOT pillage.. It happen far and away more often in the Union Army, and was condoned and joked about. Sometimes poorly fed shod rebs would “buy” things from the locals at greatly reduced prices, as far as burning pillaging in the Army of NoVa preposterous....
I pretty much went the other way. If you consider that it was a revolutionary situation and things were truly falling apart, with the Confederacy poised to take over as much of the slave states as they could grab and to weaken the rest of the country as much as they could manage, Lincoln's actions may not look so tyrannical or abusive.
Faced with a secessionist threat in our time any government wouldn't behave so differently from Lincoln's -- not to impose a tyranny, just to prevent anarchy and the surrender of citizens and territory to a rival movement that was willing to use force to get its way: for the Confederate government infringed on basic freedoms of habeus corpus, speech, assembly, and the press as well as the US government, if not more so.
I think the South had a lot more points in their favor and Union folks see the noble cause of abolishing slavery to “OK” everything that was done in its name.
Perhaps, unionists did excuse a lot in the name of abolishing slavery. But what I notice here is people associating secession and the Confederacy with liberty and excusing whatever the CSA did -- including starting the war and strongly supporting slavery -- by claiming that it was all in the name of liberty. If you hear enough of that talk, maybe you might change your mind again.