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Had it not been for the North and oppressive "Reconstruction", the South would be a far different and better place today.

It occurs to me that the end of the Civil War was the beginning of Big Government as we now know it. Before The War Between the States, we always referred to ourselves as 'these United States', reflecting the Founding Fathers' belief that the US was a collection of semi-independent states that had a single federal government to manage foreign affairs and defense.

However, Lincoln opened the door to Big Government interference. Everyone says Lincoln was a great president, but I think he helped usher in 150 years of Big Government abuse with his actions during the Civil War. In my mind he was a good president at the time, but his legacy is one of near-total disaster that we have yet to recover from.

To be blunt, the South's ideas about states rights (which is what the war was really fought over, that and economic reasons) were dead-on correct and inline with what the Founders believed. The South may have lost the war, but everybody lost the peace. It just took us 100 years to realize it.

It occurs to me that the end of the Civil War was the beginning of Big Government as we now know it.

Why not the beginning of that war? Whatever happened after 1861, the country wasn't going to be the same. If you had two hostile countries here, arming themselves against each other, one of them doing all it could to keep a slave population in chains, you'd certainly see more powerful governments on our continent.

However, Lincoln opened the door to Big Government interference.

I don't know about that. Was the hand of government offensively heavy on Americans in the late 19th century? We didn't have an income tax or very much federal regulation or control until Wilson and FDR. And realistically, could we have kept government on all levels as small as it was in the early 19th century forever? Isn't it possible that new technologies and population growth inevitably bring some growth of government?

Some would debate whether government really was that weak in the early 19th century. Could we have a Fugitive Slave Act or the forced removal of people from one part of the country today? Power still had a way of pressing down on people even before the Civil War, despite small government budgets and less federal interference in individuals' affairs.

To be blunt, the South's ideas about states rights (which is what the war was really fought over, that and economic reasons) were dead-on correct and inline with what the Founders believed.

George Washington wanted a stronger federal government than what existed under the Articles of Confederation. So did Adams and Hamilton, Madison and Jay. Even Jefferson did. They certainly wanted a nation that was more than "a collection of semi-independent states." The founders may not have wanted what we have today, but to assume that they'd have supported the rebels of 1861 is a stretch.

You'd also certainly get an argument about what the war was fought over. It's a complex question, but "economic reasons" very much included the defense of slavery, and "state's rights" looks a bit like an evasive formalism -- slaveowners weren't very solicitous of the "rights" of free states to make their own laws regarding runaways. You can turn every war into a war for "rights" of one sort or another, but that's not looking very deep, especially in this case.

The South may have lost the war, but everybody lost the peace. It just took us 100 years to realize it.

If you want to take the view that a utopia was lost in 1865 it would be hard to convince you, but I'd have to say that some people did win the peace. Freed slaves certainly did. And the country as a whole benefited by putting slavery behind us. Certainly it would have been better had the changes come without war, but we didn't lose the peace.

The problem with your statement is that you really don't look into the other side of the coin: you don't consider just how free and unfree we'd be if the Confederacy had prevailed. It's easy to come up with a snap judgment if you don't consider the alternatives.

The truth is that nobody in here knows what would've really happened if the South had won the civil war. And there is no possible way to know.

Of course, nobody knows. But it's pretty irritating to hear people say that we'd have all the good things we have now -- and then some -- if only the rebels had had their way. That's as much an unsupported conclusion as anything anyone else has said. It's also unhistorical.

Given that we don't know, we might take Confederate leaders at their word about slavery, rather than assume (as some people do) that they were closet abolitionists who would get naturally rid of slavery and its legacy "over time."

We might recognize that you can't "have it all" in political life. There would have been a real downside to giving into the rebels. It's simply not the case that we can blithely assume that we would have been freer in all things if not for Lincoln. There are some obvious ways in which many of us most likely would have been less free.