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...I'm not convinced slavery is indefensible.
Of course slavery is indefensible now , but how could it have been indefensible then if it was a common, accepted, legal, expected practice since before America was even founded until just before the Civil War. To blame the South for slavery is to ignore the pervasiveness of it throughout civilization. We now know that to consider anyone '3/5 of a person' because of his race is wrong, but it was simply a fact to people of that time. Slavery in America was going to end one way or the other, whether or not there had been a civil war. People were gradually figuring out that slaves were indeed fully human, thus the many whites who worked (legally and illegally) to free slaves, and the eventual laws passed (by a bunch of old white men) to first limit, then end it. The war resulted because the issue was forced, and was much more complicated in the south, which depended on slavery in its economy much more than did the north.

Sort of like the disasterous results of forced integration (children bussed hours away from their homes, schools packed with more kids than they were ever intended to hold, parents with no way to participate in their child's education due to distance, etc.--yes, I was there.) We would probably be in much better shape now if the attention had been focused on developing new neighborhoods that were integrated from their inception by people who wanted to live there encouraged and prodded by new fair-lending and housing practices. The schools in those neighborhoods would have been naturally integrated, and I think the result would have been much better, even if slower.

I don't exactly know how the transition away from slavery could have been sped up in the South, or even if it needed to be, and I can understand that today we say no one should have been a slave for one day more than they already had been, but things might have worked out better in the long run if slavery had been allowed to exist for a while longer, until it burned itself out. And the eternal optomist in me is sure that it would have, and pretty quickly, too. Northerners didn't have the monopoly on knowing right from wrong. They just didn't have so much to lose by making the jump.

Just my 2cents
O2