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[hifiguy]

119. I've mulled that question over for years.

There's no easy answer, but I think that Reconstruction should have lasted a lot longer and been much more vigorous in rooting out the worst elements of the slaveocracy. The post-Civil War South never really accepted the fact that it had been thoroughly defeated and its repellent "social institutions" dashed on the rocks of reason and humanity. Keeping the South under Union guns until about 1900 or so may have made the truth of the situation more apparent.

What is amazing is that the Germans and Japanese managed to understand, after WW II, that they had royally screwed the pooch and cleaned up their act in just a few years. The revanchists in those countries were quickly relegated to the furthest margins. The South, on the other hand, retains a substantial portion of people who never accepted their crushing by Lincoln, Grant and Sherman.

Lincoln's ultimate flaw was that he failed to understand that there are just plain evil, rotten people in the world, as is evidenced by his Second Inaugural Speech.