Moderate Carthaginian solution

After reviewing a broad range of historical works on the US Civil War (what we Icelanders call "The Slave War"), I'm firmly convinced that it would have been better for everybody living today if the North had pulled a moderate Carthaginian solution at the end of the war: Hanged ALL the top dogs for treason, dispossessed and exiled all major slaveholding landholders, distributed ALL their land to poor whites and former slaves in small portions, and stomped a big, fat, industrialised Northern boot repeatedly on the South's culture and economy.