Well read the article mom. The author clearly stated that the CSA could have saved itself if in 1862 or 63 it had allowed freedom for service. By eliminating 35% of its adult male population from active service while gradually watching that same population move into service for the enemy, the CSA doomed it's chances. The author is lamenting the fact that blacks couldn't serve the CSA. He wished they could have.
As to you saying that “reconstruction” poisoned race relations, I would suggest that the Black Codes enacted by Southern legislatures that attempted to circumvent the 13th Amendment and re-establish slavery poisoned relations and lead directly to reconstruction. When reconstruction ended, those same legislatures wasted no time enacting new codes in the form of Jim Crow laws. The southern power structure simply refused to allow even the hint of equality under the law.
Much unlike the northern powers before, during, and after the war you know. I'm truly suprised with all the fawning over abe, we haven't heard stories of him working on the Underground Railroad(not the railroad that went broke under his internal improvement plans 4 years after his death. That's another story altogether). Maybe we could all email Asa and get him to rewrite us some history about abe and the Railroad. Naaaahh, then he would have to explain away abe's actual quotes on race and his opinion of the abolitionists
The whole mess began when Lincoln was assassinated. At that time the writing was on the wall: the South was going to be ground into the dust in revenge by the Radical Republicans. Instead of sensible men like W.T. ("Total War and Total Peace") Sherman, the Radicals like Sen. Wade sent corrupt goons like "Spoons" Butler, and they came with the idea of punishing, not reconstructing. As Woodrow Wilson (for whom I certainly hold no brief) said in an article for the Atlantic Monthly in Jan. 1901, "Had Mr. Lincoln lived, perhaps the whole of the delicate business might have been carried through with dignity, good temper, and simplicity of method." Didn't happen. J. Wilkes Booth, the illegitimate son of an Englishman who had another family back home in Clerkenwell, didn't do the South any favors.