Hitler lost WW2, the south lost the American civil war, and we haven’t all nuked each other (yet)
The south won the war when they killed Lincoln.
They killed Lincoln but they couldn’t kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman’s Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.
Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”. What he describes is, at it’s heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.
That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.
Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.
Everyone replying seems to be confusing “timeline” with “generation” or “era”, discussing how this point in time is better than other times in history. That is not what OP was asking.
It demonstrates how things could be worse, but aren’t.
Yeah, it’s basically look at all these improvements that happen in the last n years. This is obviously better than a timeline where those changes didn’t happen.
It also gives context for what way things could be worse. Compared to a completely dissociated suggestion like, “the entire universe didn’t spontaneously turn into farts therefore this isn’t the worst timeline.”
