Kennedy mourns a history that “could have been,” in which slavery ended peacefully. He suggests that progress toward this peaceful evolution came to an end because of Northern incitement of bloody slave rebellions and because of abolitionist propaganda depicting white Southerners as evil. For those who point to the gross mistreatment of slaves before the war and of freedmen after it, he notes that many whites and blacks got along well, to the extent that blacks often remained loyal to their former masters and were willing to die for them.

Although Kennedy has demonstrated the errors of the conventional view, I am inclined to think that some of his claims are exaggerated. But surely, he is right that the policy of centralized despotism that Lincoln instituted has continued down to the present and has enslaved us al