The relationships between blacks and whites before the Civil War were sometimes complex. Black freedmen, black slaveholders, and slaves allowed to run households were found in major cities, especially Baltimore, Charleston and New Orleans. Black soldiers there were; their varied stories eclipsed. These, of course, are a small minority, overshadowed by conditions on the farms and plantations.
Victory for the North meant ruin for freedmen in most of the south, since the reaction against Reconstruction put all blacks in the same category in the minds of most southerners. Large scale migration to the north persisted until the 1960s, when the trend started to reverse following access to civil rights.

Slavery is evil- no other word fits (although that word has become somewhat tainted in the hands of Bush). It took a long time for white Europeans and Americans to rid their lands of it- The English roughly in 1837 (Sierra Leone area of Africa), the Americans in the States by the end of the Civi War, although it persisted in forms in parts of the Australasian area for a few decades longer. The peonage system in Latin America essentially was a form of slavery that persisted into the 20th c. and still is a cause of civil unrest.