Wobbly guy: Well we do know. The constitution was upheld. It was amended to prohibit slavery. No broad ranging federal powers were implemented across the nation as a whole in the aftermath of the Civil War. There was no income tax. No federal police force. No FBI.No armies of government officials massed in huge and powerful federal bureaucracies. Lands held by the federal government were distributed to the the citizens by various methods.

Yes there was the federal occupation of the South, what was called “Reconstruction”, but this was inevitable all thing considered. Soon it too passed.

The South, after reconstruction, was pretty much ignored.

Political life in the North pretty much went on as before, though there was a new spirit alloyed by a growing national consciousness.

The West was won. Vast, bustling private enterprises were created and rigorously perused. A vigorous new titan emerged which gave the average man more freedom and opportunity for self-betterment than the world had ever seen before. The nation was an altogether better place.

It is a delusion of the some corners of the modern Right that State’s Rights were demolished by the Civil War. This would come in the 20th century.

It would come by wholly other means than the Civil War.

With the charge that the Civil War stepped outside the bounds of the American political tradition handed down by the founders and was thereby the necessary precursor and enabling foundation of the modern socialist state, the burden of proof is on the side of the accusers.

Thus far we have seen more smoke and fire than light out of them.

It may well be that the massive migrations of Central Europeans accustomed to the welfare states of Central Europe, the very people the Democrats manipulated to rise to power in the 1930′s, had more to do with the ascendancy of socialism in the USA than anything that went before.

If we are to undo this condition, we must decouple the argument from the Civil War. That it has been so joined in the first place is suspect and specious. We must place the break with the founding traditions squarely where it properly belongs and cease giving the propagandists of the Left more fodder for their lies and misdirections.