In the end, no contest
The Civil War, fought from 1861-1865, intended to determined how these United States were going to live together: would they be a dissolvable confederation of sovereign states or an indivisible nation with a sovereign national government AND, to what degree would all persons be equal or would it continue to be the largest nation of slave holders in the world? 625,000 people died in the Civil War, more than in any other war this country has fought. The war left this country broken from the loss of life, the bitterness over the ideologies that led to the battle, the disagreement about human rights and who is valued, and disagreements over who can live freely in this country. President Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, named slavery as the cause of the war and held the entire country accountable and complicit in the sin of slavery, both the North and the South. In many ways we as a nation are still wrestling with unresolved conflict and moral guilt for the circumstanc