The Larison-Kirchik volley that Jonah links to below is basically yet another argument over whether Union victory in the Civil War was a good thing. As a Lincoln man myself, I’m not stirred by the Lost Cause, though I find it hard at this late date to get worked up about people who are — malice toward none, charity for all, and so on. But it’s long seemed to me that losing the Civil War was probably the least-bad option — for the South. Because, contrary to Harry Turtledove’s wishful thinking in Guns of the South, the result of Confederate victory would eventually have been a war of mutual extermination between whites and blacks that would have made Rwanda, let alone Sherman’s March, look like a picnic. Brazil’s peaceful emancipation could never be a model for a one-drop society, nor could the experience of emancipation in the North, where the numbers and percentages of slaves were so small. Once the South became a slave society, there was no good way out; wise sons of the South, while rightly honoring the valor of the ancestors, should thank God they lost.