The Civil War was a disaster and a step backward for nearly every inhabitant of the South, both Black and White alike, if you include the huge number of people who starved or died of epidemic diseases. This included a large percentage of former slaves as well as poor whites who never owned slaves and were poor because slavery had forced them to work for subsistence wages.
Slavery could have been ended without the Civil War. Both the North and the South were responsible for the moronic jingoism that resulted in the Civil War.
The North, being the winner, wrote the book on how it turned out, and like all such accounts, it was inaccurate and skewed in favor of the North, because no one ever likes to admit that all those people died in vain, when the actual fact is that in a war that is precisely why they die. People die in vain because those in charge were incapable of working out a peaceful solution. I suggest that you say that my statements do not make sense because you are unaware of how utterly disastrous the Civil War was to everyone in the South. It took at least three generations, from 1865 to the 1940's for much of the South to recover from the War
