I finished reading a great book last night, and this morning, for Read Across America day, we had a local theater company present Minty, from a book about the young Harriet Tubman. 
It was pretty hard to take in, as raw as I felt after reading the history of the most revised period in American history.
I had just assumed or understood that slavery was at the heart of the rebellion, not realizing how open and honest the people of the time were about it. The code words “state’s rights” are really a modern phenomenon. That phrase was used at the time, yes, but getting a Southerner to admit that slavery was what was meant was by no means difficult. Today, it’s not so easy. But a review of the events of the 1840s through 1861 makes it clear that the irrevocable enshrinement of human bondage into law was the issue, no ifs, ands, or buts.
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It was hard going through the book as the war should have ended much earlier and with much less bloodshed and destruction. It’s by no means clear that emancipation would have happened, as Lincoln seems to have been persuaded to use it as a lever as the war dragged on. He did come to see it as the only honorable and moral thing to do but that took more time to arrive at than the political strength of the move.
I recommend the book, especially the Illustrated edition, as the maps and photographs add a great deal. I didn’t quite grasp how much time I had spent on (every workday for almost 5 years) or near a Civil War battlefield (another 5 years or so, at different times). And Sherman’s march to the sea was awful, no doubt, but was there another way to end the war?
As for the title of this post, one can’t help but wonder if the descendants of those who fought for the Lost Cause will ever free themselves from their own bondage. That way of life was not worth fighting for, and certainly not worth dying for. The agrarian ideal of gentleman farmers and a pre-industrial world sounds wonderful, but it was supported by slavery: without the unpaid labor of those people, it would not have been possible. I’m not sure those who deny that the unwillingness to do away with chattel slavery and who refuse to understand that secession was an appallingly bad idea (that would cost uncounted lives (600,000 uniformed men on both sides and who knows how many civilians) and enormous devastation to land and property) are living in the same reality.
I haven’t read up on the post-war period, when so much of the political gains of the war were squandered for almost 100 years afterward, but Booth’s legacy, removing Lincoln from the scene, was a high price to pay.