"Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now 
(were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from 
history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time 
substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a 
handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, 
those memories and lessons, are the most ideal part of what we now own 
together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood 
poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing in 
cold blood to start another civil war now to gain another similar 
possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition."

William James, "The Moral Equivalent of War" (1910)