[Travis McGee]

Valid points. But the Civil War was a unique time in our history.

Do you wish that a slaveholding south had won its independence, breaking the Union?

What great free nation would have then been able to resist the Nazis and Japan, and later the USSR?

[Jack Black]

Who knows if those entitites would even have existed if the South had won? The USA would not have been big enough to help France win WW1, we might not have fought. Maybe they would have been owned by the Kaiser. Without Versais Treaty Hilter would have been just another bad artist.

I do certainly think that the end of slavery, as a side effect of the war, was a great thing. Perhaps for this reason alone the North had to prevail. I often what would have happened if the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, had abolished slavery before Lincoln thought of it.

Ideally I would prefer the war never was fought, that it was resolved through negotiation, and (in my alternate history) both the citizens and the states retained far more rights as a result of not have had the Imperial Lincoln presidency.

Hows that? Did you ever read the Novel by L. Neil Smith where the citizens won the Whiskey Rebellion?