It should also me noted here that the abolitionists movement had been in full swing for a generation when the War Between the States began... I have argued in the past that it was just a mmatter of time and politics before it would have ended...

(Of course, people say, "Prove it" which is not at all fair because that is impossible no matter how much one understands the history...)

But here's the scenario... The results of the unCivil War were so long lasting that we still fell them today... I wonder if slavery had ended without the war whether or not that would be the case... I mean, when you look at not only the crushing defeat of the South and it's consequences both long term and short term this was beyond crushing, it was devastating to the South...

Lets review:

1. The war took out the South's brightest and it's best... People forget that then South prided itself on having a class of very well read and educated people... These folks were the first to enlist as they thought the conflict would be over in a matter of a couple weeks or months... Those losses led to the South having to rebuild without it's best educated...

2. The Reconstruction/Occupation of the South until after the Hayes-Tilden deal in 1876 was like having one kick sand in yer face every day for years... This left Southerners as doubly humiliated...

3. During Reconstruction/Occupation Southern blacks were, thanks to the Union occupation, able to to assume positions of authority in the South which further infuriated the Southerners...

4. After the Union pulled out in '76 there was really no interim control leaving the remaining white Southerners free to extract whatever revenge/retaliation on the freed slaves beginning an 80 year period of Jim Crow terrorism... This in itself proved to be almost as damaging to the well being of the nation as the war itself... Jim Crow wasn't officially dealt with by the "union" until the 1960s, folks, and there are still people alive, me included, who were part of that struggle to try to get Jim Crow in the grave but...

5. ...Jim Crow is more than hatred of blacks... It is also a hatred of federalism and it has been passed down from generation to generation and still very much part of the Southern psyche today... It explains why the Democratic Party, once the party of the South, is thought in many Southern circles to be the enemy for having pushed the Civil Rights Act...

I mean, when we look at the effects of the war on our country it is MHO that had the abolitionists movement been not short-circuited by the unCivil War that we, as a nation, would be a lot further down the road today...

BTW, I do not understand why so many folks glorify this terrible failure... I mean, it's one thing to understand the history of the war and the various battles, many which were just too many folks being in the wrong place at the wrong time (Antietam) but quite another to romanticize and glorify America's most shameful period...

Bad on both sides...

B~