What If the South Had Won the Civil War?

I just took a ride down to a convenience store to buy cat food and kitty litter and drove a short distance on Breckenridge Street. I live in Massachusetts, which as the center of the abolitionist movement before the Civil War, in almost every town has a street named after the man who served as Vice President from 1857 through 1860, then went home to Kentucky and ended up commanding the Confederate army in Shenandoah before he fled abroad in 1865 but returned and was a lawyer in Kentucky until he died in 1875.

So, as I was driving up Breckinridge Street this afternoon, I wondered what would have happened if the South had won the Civil War? Which isn’t such a fanciful question because if it hadn’t been for two brigades from Pennsylvania who held the Union line against Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, the picture of Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis might be on the dollar bill, ditto the first-class stamp.

I was born and raised in Washington, D.C. Our house was less than a mile from Fort Stevens, which is where the Union Army would have defended the capital city if Lee’s troops had come marching down from Gettysburg after they had won that fight. Fort Stevens was defended by ten cannons, Lee’s troops had at least 100 big guns.

I used to run up and down the ramparts on Fort Stevens all the time. Believe me, if the Confederate…