Slaying Another Sacred Cow

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/the-minds-of-the-south/ This was a dose of history and reasoning that caused considerable upset among the mental defectives at the NY Times website. It is well to keep two things in mind: first, slavery was Constitiutional and, second, the secession of the South was no more a crime than the secession of the Thirteen Colonies from Britain 85 years earlier. But, in the later war the tyrants triumphed, a major defeat that accelerated the long slow decline of liberty in America. The states had been conceived by the Framers as a major balancing power against the central government. The War of Northern Aggression ended that system of balance and made way for the tyrannical control the feds exercise today. Had war been averted, the slave system would probably have lasted another 20-30 years. Had the South prevailed, slavery would not have held out much longer. The entire world was moving away from that institution--there's no reason to believe America would have evaded the trend. Instead of these counterfactuals, though, half a million men died, at least half a million civilians died in the war and its immediate aftermath, the South's economy was damaged for generations, and the freed slaves were little, if any, better off economically than they had been under the old dispensation. Oh, and a terrible precedent was set for authoritarian, arbitrary central government in America. To me, Lincoln was a talented man, but no hero.