Read my friend Dr. Joseph W. Danielson's new book when it comes out next year. It is about Union occupations of the Tennessee Valley during the Civil War. I edited a large portion of the manuscript and you ardent CSA defenders may be surprised at what warfare did to the people here: abject poverty, roving bands of bandits, CSA and USA agents alike rounding up every spare chicken and cow and ham in the smoke house. One telling observation from a diarist in Courtland was "So much for our Revolution!" once she saw Yankee gunboats coming up the River. The people of Florence heard the cannons from Shiloh and first thought a great storm was brewing to the NW. But it never came. What did come were the dead and wounded and then Yankee gunboats and the US Cavalry. Slaves were called "contraband of war" by the US troops and barely fed as they marched alongside them, and many were abandoned to fend for themselves on barrier islands off Savannah. So much for our revolution, indeed.
The task for the South is to recover from our poverty and our history of slavery and work for a biracial prosperous society where Martin King's words may be true as are Jefferson's.