My point to the "slavery was on its way out" was that the North and South stumbled needlessly into a war in the 1860's that they should never have fought. They did so because of their pride and intransigence. In so doing they created havoc and disaster beyond their wildest imaginations, and put deep wounds in the country that still have not fully healed.

I think it would have been far better if cooler heads had prevailed and they had not fought that war. It would have been better if the Southern states had not seceded, but had continued to negotiate within the Union.

There were hotheads on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, they mutually set their country on the road to disaster, and I believe that in doing so they made a terrible error. Of those hotheads, I would say that the ones in the South made the more grievous errors. They were extremely unrealistic to imagine that the North would tolerate secession, and they were even more unrealistic to imagine that they could win the war which would inevitably follow.

Do I think that a decade or two more of slavery in the South would have been preferable to tearing the country in two, wrecking half of it for at least a generation, and killing hundreds of thousands of people?

Yeah, sorry...but I do think that would have been preferable, frankly. I think it's better to open a stubborn jar of pickles slowly than to smash it apart with a sledgehammer.

And I have just as low an opinion of slavery as you do, Ron. (I HAVE my "liberal" credentials. I believe in racial equality and I always have.) But.......I have an even lower opinion of huge and unnecessary wars...because they cause human suffering on a far vaster scale.

That was my point.