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I won't argue railroad gauges with you, I'm not any sort of expert in that field. I still think that you overestimate the trade possibilites with Mexico and Central America, but since the confederate leadership had designs in expanding southward they would have wound up as confederate territory anyway.

Second premise is that an emancipation of southern slaves would have followed Gettysburg is extremely far featched for several reasons. One, Lee wasn't that opposed to slavery and the rest of the southern political and business leadership even lest disposed to ending slavery - why do away with a large part of your wealth and the primary reason for starting the war in the first place? Two, why do something that drastic in the face of complete victory? The south didn't take the step of enlisting and arming slaves until less than a month before Lee surrendered. If they wouldn't take the step when the confederacy faced it's worst crisis then why would they do it on the brink of total victory?

The third problem is that the North did not fight the war to end slavery. Churchill is wrong on this. They fought to preserve the Union, and 9 out of 10 Union soldiers would have been highly indignant if you told them otherwise. Slavery as a political aim didn't come about until the last year or so of the war when the 13th Amendment was voted on and Lincoln made it part of the 1864 Republican platform. Freeing the slaves would have not done anything to the Northern will to fight.

Finally, nothing is said of bitter feelings after the war. Your side lost and most of you sothron supporters are still pissed about it - why do you think that the North would have been any more adult about it. A confederate victory would have inevitably lead to more fighting between the two countries, more anger and more desire for revenge on one or both sides. Like I said, it wouldn't have prevented a world war, it probably would have hastened it.

The Churchill piece, which I had never read, is interesting but the premise rides on four flights of fancy which make it impossible. One is the defeat at Gettysburg results in the collapse of the North. That wouldn't have happened. The Army of the Potomac had been routed at Chancellorsville two months prior to Gettysburg and they came back. Had Lee won the Army of the Potomac would probably have fallen back on Washington - which was heavily fortified in it's own right - and prevented Lee from taking the city. With Vicksburg fallen, Grant would have been brought east anyway and the Army would have lived to fight another day. Time, men, material, and resources were still against Lee.

Maybe so, maybe not. I expect the events at Gettysburg have been wargamed more than any other battle in history, and I saw some interesting *How I'd have done it* theses while at the Command and Staff College at Levenworth. I can think of a few variations that could well have altered the results of that day, and the possibilities are endless- but it would have been foreign military assistance to the confederate cause that might have posed the greatest threat to Washington, and after the South's loss at Gettysburg, there was no chance of that. And Vicksburg might not have fallen, had Hood not squandered his troops- and generals- at Franklin.

Though the Confederate army didn't enlist/arm slaves until the closing days of the war, Cleburne had proposed it as early as late 1863 or early 1864. There's certainly an open question as to how many troops that might have gained the army in the field, and how soon they might have been fully trained and brought to effective service, as well as what their numbers might have done to a supply system stretched to the breaking point. But as the saddest words of tongue or pen offer, *it might have been....*

Well, it's of course true that Lincoln had no particular taste for bringing the freed blacks into the American society, and considered a number of schemes to find them homes elsewhere, including the Argentine and in African Liberia. But it was certainly a part of the wartime propaganda, and at least given as some claim of the moral superiority of the north-versus-south reason for killing each other. Certainly most Southerners did not believe they were primarily fighting to preserve slavery, but hoped to maintain their way of life and their freedom from interference from Washington.

I'm not so certain that it was *my side* as I'm a fairly recent resident of the south, though admitedly an enthusiastic one; I believe I'm more Texian than purehearted Memphian, but likely I would have followed the flags of Forrest or Cleburne had the time of my birth come a few dozen years before it did to give me that opportunity, along with my neighbors and friends I might have made in that day. But my observation of the after-the-fact damage is that it was the reconstruction period that really turned most folks in the South bitter enough to pass the hatred down for generations, though Sherman's war crimes certainly didn't help much and more recent hate propaganda from the left and right coast has been producing a fine Southern backlash.

It doesn't hurt to remember that for some 227 years the United States has been an experiment in social living and governance under the constitution that's held it together for all those years. Would it not be particularly ironic if it were the governmental inheritors of that Unionist cause who finally rendered that document's meaning moot, null and void through their twisted interpretations and parsings, until no Americans paid it any account at all, abrogated to a fare-thee-well as it has been? Those Americans of that conflict who fell on its soil, and those of other wars who fell beneath its flag, have good cause to be spinning in their graves.

-archy-/-