Yes they lost the civil war. We know this because the CSA does not exist any more. I think that losing your entire country and failing to achieve any strategic objectives is a pretty good definition of “lost a war.” The fact that traditions of racism still existed in the southern states during reconstruction does not mean that the CSA won. That’s silly.
One of my big beefs with ML/AL is that these tools can be used to wrap bad ideas in what I will call “Machine legitimacy”. Which is another way of saying that there are many cases where these models are built up around a bunch of unrealistic assumptions, or trained on data that is not actually generalizable to the applied situation but will still spit out a value. That value becomes the truth because it came from some automated process. People cant critically interrogate it because the bad assumptions are hidden behind automation.