The idea that slavery would have died on its own due to economic and technological advancement dangerously overlooks the racial hierarchy that undergirded the South’s social order. Following the Civil War itself, Southern plantation elites instituted the “black codes” that kept emancipated slaves working in slave-like conditions and authorized the forced labor leasing of “convicts.” Once federal troops withdrew in 1877, the road to the Jim Crow South was paved. It is foolish to think that Southern plantation owners would have simply allowed their social structure to erode.

Uhhh the “Colonies” fighting to gain independence from the UK is a bit different then the South trying to leave the Union since the “Colonies” were a territory of another country with no representation in the mother country whereas the Southern States were part of the US with representation…

The reason slavery kept expanding was the cotton gin a mechanized machine. To this day we have people in 2017 who could be slaves working in the field. Slaves were also skilled laborers

You can’t be serious right now, or can you? By that irreparably fragmented and blatantly hypocritical logic, I suppose the United States was never a “REAL” country either since we “illegally” seceded from the Union with Great Britain willing to become nation of our own in the first place. I guess that, likewise, General George Washington was never a “REAL” general in a “REAL” army because he was just the same traitorous scum that Lee was for doing exactly what Lee would have done and choosing to defend his home and choose the hard and rightful path over the easy, unjust one. At least with how they perceived it, that is.

What a truly deplorable argument you just tried to shove down the throats of anyone unlucky enough to gaze upon your ludicrous words that compare an ISIS Caliphate to a country such as the CSA that openly and voluntarily vied for independence on the grounds of making their own decisions, not letting a former Whig or centralized government decide for them and bully them into taking whatever proposals were made by the Union to further creep into Southern affairs. You call Lee a “traitor”? Are you kidding me… are you f- … AT LEAST HE DIDN’T ACCEPT THE ROLE OF TAKING COMMAND OVER AN ENTIRE FEDERAL ARMY TO INVADE AND HARASS HIS OWN COUNTRYMEN. Lincoln, unlike Lee in terms of being the racist and absolutist that he was, would have accepted slavery if it would prevent a war, but unsurprisingly it didn’t and wouldn’t have mattered at that point.

In contrast to your propaganda-ridden fascist revisionism, Lee was one of the boldest, most ingenious and capable commanders to have ever lead American troops. It was because he was such a damn good tactician and that northern so-called military “leaders” were so careless that the North lost so many troops in battle compared to the confederacy earlier on, not because Lee set out to murder his fellow Americans as he would have if he had been tasked with invading his home sate of VA. Perpetuating crimes against innocent civilians is something you’d be more likely to support if you are in seemingly total favor of what happened to the South all throughout and especially in the closing years of the war. Like a typical revisionist you make the war out to be something it was not, aka a war that was apparently generally if not completely based upon f@#%$ “irrational racial hatred”? The hell?…

If there is no honor in fighting to stand up to tyranny (whether real or perceived), then there is no honor in fighting for any cause, not for real Americans at the least.

Of course, if R. E. Lee had been an honorable man, he would not have forsworn his oath to protect and defend the United States of America, which he did, in order to become a traitor against his own country, and perhaps there would have been no war.

Lee was an American, who fought against his, and our, country (the United States of America), for an imaginary “confederacy”.
Lincoln was a United States executive (our President), whose sworn duty was to protect the USA against all enemies, external OR INTERNAL. This was also the solemn responsibility which Lee, and his confederates, forswore.

(I suppose you’d expect a current U. S. president to sit back ‘patiently” and allow several of our states to become, say, an “ISIS” “caliphate”, if there were a similar insurrection, since it might “work itself out economically, in the future”. Sadly, as distasteful as it might be to go to war within our own borders, not to do so would be to shirk his or her sworn duty to our country.)

That’s the difference: Lee, who was never a general (not in a real military, or in a real country), and no longer even deserves the title of his highest actual attained rank (colonel 06), as he threw that away when he recanted his oath, to become a traitor,
vs. Lincoln, a real President, elected to serve in a real country (the USA), actually trying to live up to his sword duty.

You can’t “support our troops” and also honor cowards and traitors such as Lee, who murder them. Especially traitors who perpetrate their criminal actions against our country, simply to uphold the supposed “right” to perpetuate crimes against innocent civilians, based upon irrational racial hatred. The traitors brought on the wrong war, for the wrong reasons, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and caused the deaths of what would be, in per capita terms today, 6 or 7 million Americans.
There is no honor in treason, and no honor in pretending that this war was anything otherwise, only a tradition of rank hypocrisy.

My view is not a brief for blaming one side or the other: the question is an empirical one, and little empirical research has been done on it. I applaud Hacker’s work in general, but he is surely. wrong to assume that the deaths among white women were zero – and what about black women?