Defending slavery deprived the Confederate soldier to the same claim to nobility, but not to tragedy. — Allen Guelzo

[M]any quite frankly fought to protect slavery, which laid on the survivors of the rebel armies an incubus to which few were willing to admit in alter years. More than just one out of three Confederates whose campfires dotted South Mountain in the June dusk owned slaves... [T]hey brought slaves with them on campaign to tend to the menial jobs... The slave system had invested them with an instinctive impulse for domestic dictatorship; they could brawl, stab, and shoot, in and out of race tracks and saloons, and still assume that they were God's natural aristocrats.

[E]mancipation cannot be so easily detached from union (which is another way of saying that racial justice and liberal democracy rise or fall with each other).

[N]o democracy worth its name could continue to drag the burden of slavery around after it.