The people who started the war didn't think slavery was going to die on the vine. They saw it as an institution that their children and grandchildren and their great-grandchildren would benefit from. So if the South had won then would you have thought the 600,000 lives were worth it?
“The people who started the war didn’t think slavery was going to die on the vine. They saw it as an institution that their children and grandchildren and their great-grandchildren would benefit from.”
Some, certainly. Sort of the mid-nineteenth century version of the Obama voter.
“So if the South had won then would you have thought the 600,000 lives were worth it?”
Of course not. What an insulting thing to say.
But even if they had won, slavery was already on its way out. The soil simply wouldn’t sustain agriculture at that pace with those crops, and the industrial revolution was making slave labor largely obsolete.