The victors are allowed to call it what they want since the question of the right of secession was settled by force of arms...That is the verdict of history...
So many times we've heard this, perhaps around 1995 or so the first time for most of us. It sounded about right, even clever. But by now,
shoot, hindsight and thinking has gotten in the way.
The Confederates were definitely not the victors in the ACW, yet Confederate apologists have been allowed to "call it" a moral victory for decades. We're just not a fascist country that disallows dissension. Apologist thinking had darn near revived the Confederacy,
intact with slavery, by a couple decades after the war. Two decades more and apologist thinking was darn near the prevailing attitude of a fifth of all whites in America South and North. The Lost Cause had virtually founded itself on "calling it," not asking to be allowed.
In any event there never was a
verdict issued on who's allowed to "call it" or not regarding the Civil War. The South has had its textbooks and the North has had its texbooks.
But think about this: Anymore the big cities of the South are no more "Southern" in attitude than the big cities of the North, or Amsterdam, Netherlands for that matter (we know this is so, don't even go there). And we know that anything can be reliably fact-checked in short order. So nobody's allowed to "call it" anymore, if they ever were.