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Gordon, a retired astrophysicist

Explains why historians should write about astrophysics. Gordon clearly does not know what he is talking about. There are numerous contemporary Union sources that confirm that Blacks, as well as Indians and Jews all fought for the South. Slavery was moribund regardless of the outcome of the unnecessary Civil War. IMHO, the War set back race relations and Black progress in this country.

The Holocaust-denier level lie of Afro-Confederacy is flatly contradicted by the fact that the blood-drenched imposition of Jim Crow in the late 19th century was the South's price for accepting reunion. Legends of black confederate soldiers validate the confederate cause as deeply as Lord Dunsmore's Ethiopians validate the British cause in the American Revolution.

The rapid Northern conquest of the Deep South after Vicksburgs could not have been accomplished without the support of the large freed black slave population, which enabled the Union to garrison secured areas. That is why in the summer of 1863, after the fall of Vicksburg laid the Deep South open to invasion, whites in those states realized that a huge slave population was now a fatal vulnerability. Had blacks been on the confederate side, the confederacy would have won. It's that simple.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the fate of General Cleburne. Patrick Cleburne, the most capable general in the Confederate Army of the Tennesee, proposed in January 1864 the emancipation and enlistment of blacks. His punishment was to passed over for lesser generals in the command of the Army of the Tennessee. Cleburne was twice the general Bragg and Hood were and the soldiers of that army knew it.

Gordon clearly does not know what he is talking about. There are numerous contemporary Union sources that confirm that Blacks, as well as Indians and Jews all fought for the South. Slavery was moribund regardless of the outcome of the unnecessary Civil War. IMHO, the War set back race relations and Black progress in this country.

Well that is your opinion. And it's a question that by its very nature can never be resolved. But what support or evidence do you have to support it?

The fact that slavery was abolished elsewhere in the hemisphere peacefully by 1890 ignores the particular characteristics that would have prevailed in the Confederacy. Slavery was abolished where it was not a major feature of society, or where it could be abolished from outside and above. Slavery was abolished in the West Indies because the planters and local whites didn't have the final say over whether it would be abolished or not. Slavery probably would have been abolished by an independent confederacy when it was no longer needed economically, but whether that would have been in 1870, 1890, or 1910, or 1930, it's impossible to say, save that 1870 might have been too early and 1930 too late.

A generation or more of slavery, and what then? What would have happened to the slaves? The experience generally was a century of segregation. Does anyone really think that the Confederacy would have been better than that? Would the freedmen have been resettled somewhere? They certainly wouldn't have been granted fully equal rights with the Whites. There's a notion that fellow feeling amongst Southerners North and South would have prevailed in the end. But look at how long it took for this feeling to develop, how it couldn't overcome segregation, and how it took outside action to liberate that sense of fraternity from the institutions Southerners -- or more exactly Southern Whites -- had built.