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The Legacy Of The Civil War Essay

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The year is 1865, Lincoln is dead, and through some convoluted, insane process I am now the President. God help us all. I am faced with the challenge of uniting a fractured nation, war-torn, weary, and directionless. For all the guff Lincoln gave about preserving the union, he did a terrible job. Yes, we are physically one nation, but dominion under continual threat of violence is precisely what our forefathers fought against in the Revolution.
If I had been president, this would never have been an issue. The South would have left quietly and peacefully, as I believe self-determination is paramount to a free society. Of course, there was the moral dubiousness of slavery, and while I don’t support the institution, the eventual progress and industrialization of the western world would push slavery into the Northern-styled wage-slavery which exists in factories at this time, and eventually overseas to India and Pakistan, where it exists into the 21st century. Can society exist without slavery? Morally, I hope so. Pragmatically, I doubt it, but that is not the battle I’m fighting today. Besides, the loss of 600,000 lives and copious casualties coupled with the loss of basic life liberty due to the horrid practice of drafting, is objectively worse than the abomination that is slavery. If choosing between two evils, one of which involves actively promoting that evil, I can not in good faith claim that action was justified. Slavery is violence, war is violence. Adding violence to

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