The military strategies by which the North won the Civil War were quite horrible. Grant’s strategy was to fight a war of attrition, slaughtering as many troops as possible on both sides, because he knew the less numerous Confederates would run out of men first. Sherman campaigned through the enemy’s relatively defenseless heart-land, leaving a demoralizing trail of devestation, poverty, and starvation behind him. Before Grant and Sherman took command, the North had been doing quite badly on the battlefield; together their strategies won the war. Now the experiment: suppose that you had it in your power to change history, so that the war would never have been fought, and slavery would still be with us. Would you exercise that power? Can you confidently say that the innocent lives sacrificed to abolish slavery were too high a price to pay? If you cannot, then you are not confident that ending involuntary servitude is “never” worth taking innocent lives.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "The military strategies by which the North won the Civil War were quite horrible. Grant’s strategy was to fight a war of attrition, slaughtering as many troops as possible on both sides, because he knew the less numerous Confederates would run out of men first. Sherman campaigned through the enemy’s relatively defenseless heart-land, leaving a demoralizing trail of devestation, poverty, and starvation behind him. Before Grant and Sherman took command, the North had been doing quite badly on the battlefield; together their strategies won the war. Now the experiment: suppose that you had it in your power to change history, so that the war would never have been fought, and slavery would still be with us. Would you exercise that power? Can you confidently say that the innocent lives sacrificed to abolish slavery were too high a price to pay? If you cannot, then you are not confident that ending involuntary servitude is “never” worth taking innocent lives." in the context of "Andrew Koppelman, "Forced Labor: A Thirteenth Amendment Defense of Abortion", Northwestern Law Review, Vol. 84, (1990). pp.513-514" to mean that wisdom is timeless.