By April 1865, the Southern planters' dreams of perpetuat- ing slavery in an independent republic had vanished. Secession had cost the South a quarter of a million men dead and nearly $3 billion in slave property when three and a half million black laborers were freed. As some Southern anti-Secessionists had prophesied, the Civil War ended in the destruction of the "pecul- iar institution" it was intended to make secure.
Before Appomattox, the planters had identified the South's entire...