Though my sympathies are Southern, i admit that there were and are valid moral arguments to made on both sides, i.e. abolition vs. state sovereignty. The focus of the book however is to defend Southern culture and the Southern people, the institution of slavery not withstanding. Abolition of slavery could have been achieved, without the devastation of war, and without destroying republicanism.
That abolition would have happened in due time - I'm convinced. The American people are always on route to the moral thing - when government steps in, it retards it, twists it, sometimes destroys it, and then claims credit for the idea of it.
Charles Murray shows a bunch of trend line comparisons of where blacks were before Civil Rights (by that I mean legislated civil rights, and not talking about the right to vote,) during, and after, in terms of poverty rates, education, income etc. When you look at those lines you see almost zero change (for better or worse,) sometimes a change for the worse. What we got out of government trying to push and control that natural process a lot of resentment and an excuse for an entire portion of a culture to fail and get paid to fail.
There is zero reason for blacks in the US to be in the shape they are. That culture left to develop on its own without the intervention of government, including had the end of slavery been allowed to occur in natural course, would probably be totally integrated, with no need for handouts, and not consistently re-enforcing whatever ideas today's bigots might have.
Their oppression would be seen just as any other oppression in the history of man, endured by whites and blacks and browns throughout, whenever the other side was stronger, but just most recently not whites ... as part of what man did throughout history to each other ... under the delusion that they were doing it to a separate species.
As Steyn says ... 'farce followed by farce followed by tragedy' ... that is man's history where governments are involved. What other philosophy is reasonable other than 'keep the damn thing as small as humanly possible and watch it like it's a rapist on parole on an all-nude teenage girl's beach.'