Looking back at the Confederacy with modern eyes

Star-Telegram | Jerry Patterson:

“Any attempt to judge our history by today's standards -- out of the context in which it occurred -- is at best problematic and at worst dishonest. ... Many believe that the War Between the States was solely about slavery and that the Confederacy is synonymous with racism. That conclusion is faulty because the premise is inaccurate.”

Ed Cognoski responds:

Mr Patterson is repeating the tired old revisionist argument that the Civil War wasn't really about slavery. That instead, it was all very theoretical, all about dry political science, about principles like federalism and states' rights. Nonsense. It was about slavery.

For the first eighty years of its existence, the American nation was a balancing act between the interests of the slave-holding states and the free states. The US Constitution was a patchwork of compromises designed to balance those interests.

As long as the political power of the North and South was roughly equal, the compact held. When the North's political power grew to the point that the South felt that their way of life, i.e., slavery, was threatened, the Union disintegrated.

Now Mr Patterson would have you believe that attitudes about slavery were not sectional and therefore not a cause of war. He selectively quotes Robert E Lee and Abraham Lincoln. Yes, Lee joined the Confederate cause more out of loyalty to Virginia than slavery, but Virginia's cause was the preservation of slavery. Yes, Lincoln delayed emancipation in a diplomatic attempt to keep the border states from joining the Confederacy, but it was his certainty that the US could not endure "permanently half slave and half free" that triggered secession.

Make no mistake about it. This was a war between slave-holding states and free states. Texas' own declaration of secession leaves no doubt. Pick almost any paragraph and you'll get something like this:

In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color - a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.

The declarations of secession of all the Confederate states read like this. They are screeds about how slavery is threatened by Northern abolitionists, about how Constitutional federalism and states' rights protect the slave-holding states' peculiar institution, about how the Southern states are entitled to secede to protect the "beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery" which is supported by the "plainest revelations of Divine Law."

Mr Patterson really ought to put his quotes from Lee and Lincoln in the context in which they occurred. Read these declarations of secession and tell us with a straight face that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. That cause belongs in the dustbin of history and the flag that represented that cause belongs there, too, even if there may have been some honorable and noble men who went to war under that ignoble banner.

In the end, I can agree with only one thing Mr Patterson says, and only if he turns it on himself and his own attempts at revisionist history: "Retroactive cleansing of history is doomed to failure because it is, at heart, a lie."