being Canadian, I didn't expect to be moved by my trip to Gettysburg but I very much was. Lee's foray into the North at Gettysburg still strikes me as fatal hubris. I believe that the South would have held the Confederacy had they just stayed within their own states.
I will never buy that the war was fought for slavery. As it was before the income tax, 80% of the country's customs revenue came through New Orleans. The loss of that revenue would have made the federally governed continental US an impossibility. War is always about money and power and this one was no different.
Every other nation that had slavery ended it by legislation. The practice would have eventually died off under the weight of its immorality. The South was filled with manumission societies that fundraised to free individual slaves. Unfortunately that has been lost in the collective memory so we are now led to believe that every southerner is a white supremacist by virtue of their birthplace - such a sad and unneccessary stereo type.