Was the Civil War a Tragedy?

TNC and J.L Wall are discussing the Civil War.  TNC makes the case that the war is not a tragedy because it ended slavery.  Wall reflects on Shelby Foote's trilogy:

And yet, I read Foote’s history and find, with his narrator, tragedy.  This is not the tragedy of an avoidable war; recall that, for Foote’s narrator, the war’s opening is not tragic but exhilarating.  The narrator is more interested (on the surface, at least) in the military narrative of the war than in its causes, results, or the question of moral justification, so it is an exhilaration borne of generalship and a sense of the heroic more than from history’s greater narrative propelling the nation toward the end of slavery.  Though that last, too, is present, if in such a way that becomes more apparent as the Narrative progresses.
By the end of Gettysburg, as I have mentioned, exhilaration has given way to frustration, disgust, and tragedy.  Rather than a misguided quest for glory, Jeb Stuart’s meandering during the first days of that battle are depicted as a lost child’s desperate search for his father.  The scales begin to fall and the South’s “great” men are revealed to be self-serving (Bragg; the Hills; Hood; Stuart; etc.), blindered (Lee), or brutalizers of questionable sanity (Forrest; Quantrill).  Longstreet, perhaps, has a measure of redemption in him—but while he, shaking his head at Gettysburg, is the only one who can see the reality of their military efforts, he is merely resigned by honor of some sort to stick around for the ride.  Davis is compared from the outset to Lucifer; the image reappears near the end of Volume II as the Rebellion itself, for a moment, takes on the trappings of that angel’s against God.
The comparison is introduced through a letter written by William Tecumseh Sherman, himself a brutal warrior once relieved of duty on account of questionable sanity.  Yet he comes in (so far, at least; his march to the sea is not for some hundreds of pages) for less condemnation than his colleagues on the Southern side.  The reason is tied to the type of tragedy the narrator sees in the war at this point—and, I think, to the kind most who read of it sense: not that it had to be fought at all, but that it continues without an end at hand while terrain, technology, and the incompetence and “honor”* of the so-called great-men lead to increasing casualty rolls.  Sherman’s goal, clearly stated, is a faster end to the war; the narrator knows he will help to bring it.

I would agree with TNC that in spite of the war's costs, the benefit of ridding a nation, which was supposedly founded on freedom, of slavery, was well worth the cost.  There is definitely much tragedy to be found in this war, and its aftereffects today.  But a nation without slavery is worth it.

I think Wall's analysis of the narrative arc of the trilogy is quite interesting. Nothing bothers me more than talking to Southern partisans today, and hearing them defend the Confederacy's actions throughout the war.  It really galls me when they say that slavery was not the root cause of the war.  They don't seem to be able to appreciate the tragedy Wall is identifying in Foote's trilogy.  It makes arguing with a Republican about politics seem easy.  Of course, often when arguing with a Confederate apologist, you are arguing with a Republican.  The paradox that the party of Lincoln is now the party of the Confederacy is one of history's great ironies.  Read both TNC and Wall's posts, they are excellent.