What Might Have Been: The Western Balkans

In an article in The New York Times on August 17, President Trump's personal lawyer, John Dowd, is quoted as saying, "You cannot be against General Lee and for George Washington; there literally is no difference between the two men".

Ah, but there is. Though both were slaveholders, as President Trump, with his instinct for the jugular, has pointed out, Lee was a secessionist; Washington was the father of his country.

Did Lee, with his lack of foresight, in casting aside his Union Army commission and in joining the secession, realize that had the South been successful, what kind of a country we would have been left with? It would have been chaos — constant squabbling between the two sides. Call it the western Balkans, for that would have been what it would have looked like. The bottom line is that the United States would never have become a great country. Can anyone not realize that?

As I have written earlier, "The South’s war, brilliantly fought, was not only a lost cause, it was a bad cause". The South, by its act of secession, carried with it the mantle of slavery. It was not for nothing that for many years the country was distinguished, north and south, between "slave states" and "free states".