This was a delight to watch, and I only wish more events like this could be held to deal with the growing Civil War revisionism. It is an issue I have spent many hours studying, and so it was a pleasure to see Peter Marshall so clearly articulate what I'd learned through many hours of reading. The Civil War was, as Marshall said, not about economics or preserving states' rights, but about the slave issue. His opponent had the more persuasive rhetoric, but his limited historical proofs were nearly always half-truths, and Marshall took him to task for that. Marshall was clearly superior in historical knowledge, and it beats me how anyone could come away thinking his opponent was still right. His opponent used a logical fallacy called a false dilemma, claiming that if you don't like today's big government "nanny state", you are agreeing that the Confederacy is right. Just because the Civil War resulted in a necessary expansion of government on the part of the Union does not make the South's cause right! I also highly recommend the book Vindicating Lincoln by Thomas Kranawitter, but it is a lot more tedious to work through than this. I only wish Peter Marshall had gotten another chance to rebut his opponent, who claimed last thing that Lincoln didn't care about his own troops because he didn't send medical aid to Union POWs at Andersonville prison in Georgia. Lincoln stopped negotiating with the South about prisoners because a Confederate general massacred a Union army of blacks instead of taking them prisoner. This debate should ease your mind if you, like I, have been exposed to wild accusations that Lincoln was a wanna-be tyrant.
