I am descended from slave owners and my paternal great grandfather was captured at Vicksburg, paroled, and then took up arms again as a CSA cavalryman.
But I say slavery and the importation of Africans was the worst mistake the country ever made and there is plenty of blame for that on the northern shipping interests as well as southern farmers.
There was other friction between the north and south but except for slavery there would not have been a Civil War. Slavery was the root cause.
My maternal grandmother born in 1891 knew former slaves and grew up in the wreckage of the post-reconstruction south. Her father was a slave owner in his youth and was badly displaced and impoverished after the war. She said more than once that the south got what it deserved as punishment for slavery.
