The triumph of Union forces over the collapsed Confederacy is typically treated as a quintessential example of the existence of "good guys" in history.
Of course, the end of slavery constitutes a moral advance, but we shouldn't kid ourselves about there being any "good guys" in the story.
After all, the "good" Union trafficked in black flesh
for nearly a century, effected a compromise with defeated slaveholders
that allowed them to restore near-slavery for almost another century
(the so-called Black codes criminalizing African-American life are in
effect to this day), finished off the genocide against dozens of
indigenous peoples (the "winning" of the West), slaughtered a couple
hundred thousand Filipinos in the name of white supremacy, imposed
starvation and chaos on Germany well after WWI "peace" had been
declared (paving the way for Hitler and the Nazis), incinerated Tokyo with
fire-bombs even more thoroughly than it obliterated Hiroshima and
Nagasaki with atom bombs, then spread neo-Nazi clone states throughout
the "free" world singing the glories of capital accumulation for the
few. To this day, there's not a right-wing dictatorship we don't love.
This is the group claiming the moral high ground.
