"The scales begin to fall."

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a pair of posts about why he rejects the idea of the Civil War as tragedy. In short, he can't accept the moral equivalence (or near-equivalence) between North and South on which the brother-against-brother view relies:

It's really simple for me. One group of Americans attempted to raise a country on property in Negroes. Another group of Americans, many of them Negroes themselves, stopped them. As surely as we lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of the English, I lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of slaveholders.

J.L. Wall, writing at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, agrees (as do I) that the Civil War is not properly understood a tragedy of avoidable violence. However, he does describe a different sort of tragedy, and he does so with eloquence:

By the end of Gettysburg, as I have mentioned, exhilaration has given way to frustration, disgust, and tragedy. Rather than a misguided quest for glory, Jeb Stuart’s meandering during the first days of that battle are depicted as a lost child’s desperate search for his father. The scales begin to fall and the South’s “great” men are revealed to be self-serving (Bragg; the Hills; Hood; Stuart; etc.), blindered (Lee), or brutalizers of questionable sanity (Forrest; Quantrill).

[...]

For all the narrator’s fascination with Lee’s and Jackson’s underdog role in the first volume, by the end of the second, the South has condemned itself, militarily and morally.

It's stuff like this that keeps a fellow sticking around on the internet. The tragic arc of the Confederacy: a cultural rot so deep as to be inextirpable, slowly revealed to people that saw themselves as good. Chilling.