“Here we are”, indeed. Lynchings, massacres, expulsion, mass criminalization, a slave workforce for the plantations…and I’m only talking about the immediate aftermath for black southerners, not the centuries of continued violence.

I don't think parent poster is arguing that point. I think parent poster's point is that all of those things happened and the alternative, had the South been brutally subjugated, decimated, or humiliated, would have been objectively worse.