I was in Boston recently, and the many monuments to the American Revolution got me thinking about another revolutionary conflict, one that, had it succeeded, would probably be known as the Confederate Revolution. What follows is a contrarian approach to that war.

The American Civil War has always seemed an odd duck: it wasn’t a conflict between factions battling for control of the central government, but rather was an attempt by part of the country to break away from that government. And a remarkably successful attempt it was: making a new country is hard work, but the Confederate States of America did it, with a capital, President, and legislature, an army, and a Constitution that in many ways surpassed the original. Indeed, the Confederate Constitution corrected many defects that modern libertarians would identify in the original Constitution, including the imposition of presidential term limits, a weaker central government, a requirement that laws be simple, and specific language designed to discourage pork-barrel spending and the formation of special interest groups.

Of course, all this ignores the elephant in the room: slavery. It’s hard to overstate the importance of slavery to the historical (and continued) vilification of the Confederacy. The justification for virtually the entire mythology of the virtuous North, led by the righteous Abraham Lincoln, heroically preserving the Union, ultimately derives from a single fact: the Civil War precipitated the end of slavery in the United States. Strangely, though, this mythology conflates the entirely separate subjects of slavery and secession. Moreover, it ignores an inconvenient fact, which is that slavery remained legal in the United States throughout the Civil War—the Emancipation Proclamation freed only slaves in the Confederacy, which at the time had essentially all the appearances of a sovereign nation not subject to the decrees of a foreign president. Lincoln’s reputation as the Great Emancipator seems particularly odd; to my eye his most famous executive order seems like a pragmatic act intended to win a war rather than a noble gesture setting a people free.

What might have happened had the Confederacy simply been allowed to secede? Slavery would no doubt have persisted in the CSA—and probably in the USA as well—for several more decades, but it seems unlikely that it could have lasted very long. I find it hard to imagine slavery in the Northern Hemisphere in 1940, or even 1900. This is partially because slavery is not economically efficient, and works well only for the most menial tasks. The rise of industrialization would likely have shattered the economic model of labor-intensive cotton and tobacco farming then prevalent in the South. The global trends are also clear, with institutionalized slavery falling out of favor and eventually disappearing by mid-twentieth century. It seems unlikely that the USA and CSA would have been the only exceptions.

Of course, those extra years of slavery would have exacted a terrible toll in terms of injustice and human suffering, but it’s important to weigh that against the millions of dollars in damage and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the Civil War. Moreover, breaking up the United States into two, weaker powers, while simultaneously establishing the precedent that states can secede, would have had great value for the cause of liberty.

Ultimately, I find myself wishing that the North had seceded instead of the South. If, instead of the (slave-holding) Confederate states, the free states had been the ones to secede, the separate issues of secession and slavery would have stayed separate. In this case, the question of slavery would still persist, but in a more honest form: should the recently seceded Free States of America invade the (slave-holding) United States—a sovereign nation—in order to free the slaves? Perhaps the answer would still be ‘yes’, but at least the underlying issues would be clear.