"Slavery Was Good for the Slaves"

That seems to be the central thesis of Michael Medved's argument. We should be proud of slavery and of ending it?

What sort of yahoo is he? Slavery wasn't ended because good and decent people woke up one sunny Spring morning and said: "Let's free the slaves" and it was done. He seems to gloss over the fact that it took a war to end slavery, a war that devastated an entire region of this country and killed 500,000 Americans in the process. (If you want to compare that to modern population, think of having that war today and killing 4,700,000 Americans.)

Here's an inconvenient truth for Medved: Without slavery, the Civil War would not have been fought. Slavery almost tore apart the American Confederation and almost doomed the Constitutional convention. Slavery was a time bomb and the Founding Fathers knew they were just doing a "Dubya" and they kicked that can far down the road.

Here's another inconvenient truth: Smugglers were bringing slaves into the South right up to the start of the Civil War.

Here's a third one: Of the so-called "civilized nations" of the West, the US was about the last to abolish slavery and the only one that had to fight a war with the slaveowners to do so.

And here is a fourth and last one: The "noble cause" was always bullshit. Draft-dodging was rampant throughout the South, for the poor whites saw the war for what it truly was, a war to protect the privileges of the slave-owning aristocracy.