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So there it is, the story of the struggle by millions of Americans to deal with the questions of slavery and secession. In the end, our leaders failed to preserve the peace, we fought our bloodiest war, which the North won, thus ending slavery and preserving the Union.
However, as you now know, the war, for all the changes that it caused, did not entirely remake the segregated social order of the South or bring real equality between the races. Since, as many historians have argued, the North may have won the war but the South seemed to win the peace.
Slavery was indeed terrible, for both the slaves, and Whites who were stained by the terrible thing that they were doing. White Americans may have grown wealthy by the toil of millions of slaves, but in the end, there was a price to pay.
That price, President Lincoln argued, was the devastation and heartache of war. He believed in a just God who let the war come as a righteous punishment for slavery.
What do you think? Was the Civil War a righteous judgement for America’s embrace of slavery?
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