The image I like to remember is the victorious Ulysses S. Grant telling the defeated Robert E. Lee and his officers to keep their horses, keep their sidearms, and go home to their families, but not before being fed from Union rations.
Lee returned to his men and said: "Go and be as good a citizen as you were soldiers".
And Grant went to his: "Stop the firing. The Rebels are our countrymen again."
Lincoln later remarked: “To be harsh or spiteful, or punish them, or throw (the Union's) win in their face, was not going to do anybody any good.”
If these great men could so magnanimous after a vicious and bloody war, what does it say about us that we are so spiteful and triumphalist in the course of ordinary politics.