title: The War Between the States: America's Uncivil War
author:  John J. Dwyer 
description: The best textook for the high school, preparatory academy or junior college I have ever read. --Roger McGrath, retired professor of history, UCLA<br /><br />Partial truths are more dangerous than open falsehoods, as error is more easily concealed and more difficult to uncover. The history of the Civil War taught in secondary schools is typically a partial truth that conceals more than it reveals. Dwyer corrects this error not by adopting a Southern point of view - though that view is rightly included - but with a magisterial account that comprehends both in a tragic story that most Americans have yet to confront. --Donald Livingston, professor of philosophy, Emory University
zlib_text: # THE CONTEST IN AMERICA
  
  ## BY JOHN STUART MILL
  
  #### REPRINTED FROM FRASER'S MAGAZINE
  
    
  
    
  
  # The Contest in America
  
    
  
    
  
  The cloud which for the space of a month hung gloomily over the civilized
  world, black with far worse evils than those of simple war, has passed from
  over our heads without bursting. The fear has not been realized, that the only
  two first-rate Powers who are also free nations would take to tearing each
  other in pieces, both the one and the other in a bad and odious cause. For
  while, on the American side, the war would have been one of reckless
  persistency in wrong, on ours it would have been a war in alliance with, and,
  to practical purposes, in defence and propagation of, slavery. We had, indeed,
  been wronged. We had suffered an indignity, and something more than an
  indignity, which, not to have resented, would have been to invite a constant
  succession of insults and injuries from the same and from every other quarter.
  We could have acted no otherwise than