I agree and don't really see a deep disagreement but just a different approach to looking at the issue. However, the South and North were decidedly different, and radically so. Southern states refused to abolish slavery and were forced to as a result of defeat; Northern states abolished it by law on state levels form 1777 to 1804. Southerners segregated schools by laws and vastly underfunded the black ones on a basis of 10 to 1 in expenditures. It was against the law to segregate schools in the North from before the Civil War and onward. My mother sat next to black children in high school on staten island in the 1950s because there was no "separate but equal" school system for those one hundred years after the civil war. There was no unity, so actually Allison in the South is right, while Super Mrs. C in Boston is right.