I hope you don't equate me with being a League of the South Moonbat.. Lee lost and surrendered. The country is a lot better now than it was or could have been before secession and the civil war. By seceeding the war and then reconstruction that followed, the nation as a whole had to examine its national soul and change the direction it was going in. I'm somewhat divided in my feelings about the subject myself, because my mother is from New York, but my father is from Louisiana and I grew up in Kentucky, which remained in the union, but became a southern state during reconstruction. Slavery was wrong, but so was the overbearing central government with its authority imposed by military might of the likes of Ulyssees S. Grant and William Tecumseh Satan, err Sherman. I think the overbearing government power concentrated in the federal government leading up to the war was far worse than holding 1.5 million persons in servitude.. With the south, the slaves may not have had freedom in the sense we think of, but not had the soft slavery that came with things like welfare, abortion and affirmative action. Those instiitutions were far more pernicous and racist than the "peculliar institution."