Who won the American Civil War?

In the wake of a couple of months during which I seemed to lack the initiative to write about anything, I am hopeful that I am regaining the capacity to be needlessly long-winded in addressing numerous topics, most of which remain hopelessly abstract in their conception and connection to my everyday life, preparing marinated meat kabobs for July 4th celebrations in the lower Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.  This particular post seeks merely to advance a contemporary question in regard to the supposed objectivity of American history at one its most calamitous moments.  I intend to write at length on this topic when I have truly taken the time to approach it from all angles in order to produce a genuine piece of amateur historical analysis that could bore to sleep anyone unwilling to take for granted that the topic cannot be objectively answered at the present time.  I am asking it, moreover, with the larger supposition/suggestion that we New Englanders, in particular, as American citizens, should really engage ourselves in debate over just what our history actually means.  In doing so, it would be to our benefit if we took the liberty to throw out all of our preconceived notions of what has actually happened from the first moments of our revolution to the present day in order to truly open ourselves up to the possibility that everything we learned in history class was, sadly, erroneous. 

As Southern Republican politicians now stumble to get out of each others' ways in denouncing the legacy enshrouded in Confederate battle flags and reassuring the rest of the country that the South has decisively transformed itself since the days of Jim Crow segregation and the high tide of mainstream Ku Klux Klan White supremacy, the massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist-Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina (as well as other suspicious events since then involving Black churches) makes it at least somewhat apparent to me that it would be a mistake to regard the South as a monolithic entity and, as such, to make conclusive statements with regard to how the South has changed, both since the 1960s and, for that matter, since the 1860s.  Going further, to the extent that we recognize the demographic complexities implicated in any analysis of the South, we need to further recognize that, more than with any other region of the U.S., the history of the South and of Southerners, both White and Black, has been profoundly shaped by the Civil War and by the particular interpretations that Southern students of the conflict have brought to the table in an attempt to situate it in reference to the myriad processes leading to its initiation. 
With this in mind and the peculiar (but, possibly, mistaken) notion that "the victors write the history books," it appears to me that the question of who actually won the American Civil War remains subject to debate.  In a larger sense, notwithstanding the fact that the guns have lain silent since 1865, it might be conceivable to ask whether the Civil War actually ended, or whether it has simply continued in other forms, along diffuse, non-geographically-defined fronts with divergent, punctuated moments in which the same issues come back to the fore, engaging renewed and continuously evolving arrays of combattants over states' rights, the expansiveness of federal governmental power, race relations, and the broader meaning of the American experience as a collective historical legacy.  These are questions for which I, emphatically, lack a definitive objective response.  Rather, I hope soon to articulate a persuasive argument at length in order to say, most succinctly, that the particular ways in which we, as a nation (whatever that might imply!), have entered into debate on the meaning of this moment in our history have shaped the political, cultural, and economic development of the U.S. since the end of the Civil War and will continue to do so.