The short answer is no. The long answer is it is a difficult question that requires mankind to face himself and his own evil.

The premise of the Civil War is said to have been slavery. But the issue was not slavery itself; this was not an issue in the minds of those who founded the United States of America. It was, at the time of America's founding, simply “normal” for there to be slavery.

The problem is, people changed and started to realize that slavery was wrong. But these people decided that instead of letting everyone come to change their minds that they would enforce their will upon them. Thus, using the concept of democracy, the people of the big cities who did not continue to rely upon slave labor – the growing middle class urbanites – attempted to inflict their will upon a minority of states.

Again, while slavery was the issue, the reason for the Civil War was simply an overreach of federal power by the US Government in attempting to inflict the will of the majority of states upon a minority of states. These states reacted by attempting to form their own union, separate from the United States of America.

No, that union was not founded on slavery. It was quite literally founded on the notion of freedom, in this case, the freedom to continue an institution the rest of the world also continued but which a class of people, city dwellers who didn't have to rely economically on a pool of cheap labor (because they WERE that pool of cheap labor) had decided to stop supporting.

And so, perhaps now you can understand why the American Civil War is not extensively taught in school (I never learned a thing about it in California nor in the two years I was in school in Oklahoma even.) It was not taught because it was not a just war, rather it was an event in the history of the United States of America that would have taught us today that yes, indeed, America is an authoritarian state, run by oligarchs and through mass-manipulation of people through ignorance and propaganda campaings.

Perhaps another civil war is coming. Perhaps this time, the right side will win.

By the way, look at the history of slavery in the south. It was already unpopular by the time the Civil War started. And propaganda was easier to spread back then – no internet. So people had to believe what they were told, and I have to imagine that newspapers did not tell the story about the Union trying to take away people's slaves, but rather that the Union was trying to inflict the will of the majority of states onto a minority of states at a time when the nature of the United STATES of America was far more clear than it is today.

I know which side I would be on. How about you?

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