Civil War parallel

Very interesting article about parallels between what's going on in Iraq and the post-Civil War South.

The Confederate insurgency was just as brutal and immediate. Just days after Gen. Robert E. Lee consigned his sword at Appomatox, Confederate loyalists assassinated Lincoln and gravely wounded William H. Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state, in a separate attack on the same evening. As Northern teachers, preachers, lawyers, and businessmen flooded the defeated South, white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camilia, and the White Brotherhood committed atrocities against newly freed African-Americans, and against those white judges, legislators, clerics, and editors who sided with the freedmen.

In an 1866 episode that seems to presage one of the most horrific spectacles of the Iraqi conflict, insurgents near Pine Bluff, Ark., burnt a black settlement and left dozens of African-American men, women, and children hanging by their necks from nearby trees as admonition. In another eerie portent, a gang of 500 masked men assaulted a Union jail in Spartanburg, S.C., in 1871, destroying property, whipping hundreds of Republicans and their sympathizers, and lynching eight.

You can only take such parallels so far of course, but it's obvious that in both instances we are up against a bunch of scumbags who are upset over the fact that they can no longer repress other segments of the population as they see fit.