What keeps bugging me about the war is that...
Well, it's always about Lincoln being the great hero, while the Confederacy being the "bad guys". That's the way they teach American history, isn't it? But you can't really say that, not about a historical conflict. While it is true that the South refused to free their slaves, and keeping slaves is bad, this is only something we can say today, when human rights are something people are aware of from the youngest age.
Back then, the agricultural Southerns could see no other way than to keep slaves; they needed workers, and lots of them. Easy for the industrial North to say, "free your slaves", wasn't the entire economy of the South based on Agriculture, i.e. black labor?
I mean, if I put myself in the position of a Southern farmer, and I had like, 20 slaves working on my field, and suddenly this guy comes from the North and tells me to free the slaves, what would I tell him?
Probably "no, are you crazy? F**k you."
So OK, Lincoln did free the slaves, and kept the United States... United, but the war he led brought the deaths of half a million Americans and destroyed the South economically. So is that such an achievement in the long run? Or has he just sped up a process fated to occur eventually?