DiogenesLamp: "Yes, but I was unaware of this until about the last three years.
I got a hint of it a little over a decade ago, but I didn't realize the truth of it until I began to notice things that didn't make any sense if you believed what we were told growing up.
We've been lied to about the Civil War for our whole lives."
That's another lie.
In fact, Lost Causer revisionism, begun by Confederates like Jefferson Davis before war's end, hoped to deny the centrality of slavery to secessionists, while emphasizing "states rights" to secede unilaterally for any reason, or no reason, and the "villainy" of President Lincoln.
And much of Lost Cause revisionist myth was bought into by most Democrats of the time, hoping to use it as a tool for reuniting the old pre-war Democrat alliance of Northern Big City immigrant bosses with Southern slave-masters.
So it's just rubbish to say, "the Lost Cause truth was hidden", it wasn't, ever, by the old Democrat party.
It only began to be dropped when Democrats began flipping constituents from descendants of slave-holders to descendants of their slaves.
Only then many Southern schools began dropping Lost Cause myths in favor actual Civil War era history.
DiogenesLamp: "...unfortunately you have to search out this information, and you have to look for it while being subjected to the gale force wins of revisionist propaganda, and 'everybody knows the war was fought over slavery' ad populum fallacy. "
No, the myth you have to supposedly "search out" was actually taught for generations as gospel throughout the South:
- "...James Cobb in his 2005 book "Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity."
Cobb recounts how in 1911, for instance, University of Florida history professor Enoch Banks wrote an essay for the New York Independent suggesting that slavery was the cause of secession;
Banks was forced by the ensuing public outcry to resign.
Perhaps Banks should have seen that coming: seven years earlier, William E. Dodd, a history professor at Virginia’s Randolph-Macon College, had complained that to merely suggest the confederacy might not have been a noble enterprise led by lofty-minded statesmen 'is to invite not only criticism but enforced resignation.'...
"...In 1913, for instance, the sons of confederate Veterans succeeded in banning from the University of Texas history curriculum a book that they felt offered an excessively New England slant on recent history....
"...As late as the 1970s, neither textbooks nor curricula veered far from lost cause interpretations, especially in the Deep South,' writes historian Karen L. Cox — and in his book on the civil rights era in Mississippi, historian John Dittmer concluded that the lost cause version of post-Civil War reconstruction in the South still held sway among the vast majority of whites in that state as recently as the early 1990s."
"...Die-hard defenders of some version of the Lost Cause today say that the South has always been the victim of 'political correctness' in school textbooks, and that this continues to this day.
The truth is just the opposite: for decades, publishers of school textbooks went out of their way not to offend delicate Southern sensibilities in their treatment of the Civil War"
DiogenesLamp: "The numbers tell the truth.
The North deliberately provoked a war with the South because the South was going to take away most of their European trade, and thereby cause all sorts of financial stress in their wealthiest city."
No, that's just your own fantasy, projecting your own inner Democrat mind-set onto those you disparage.
Union motives were no different than American motives in, for example, WWII -- we were attacked, we had to defend and destroy the source of that attack.
And just as, by the grace of God, WWII left the US much stronger as a world economic & military leader, so Civil War also enhanced the United States.
But no reasonable person would disparage the US for those results any more in one war than the other.
DiogenesLamp: "The Empire of New York was behind this war because someone dared threaten their money stream."
Nonsense.
New York's wealthy Democrats supported Civil War, but only half-heartedly, and soon after reformed their old alliance with Southern Democrats.
Yes the new alliance was less successful than before but did accomplish its one essential goal: removal of Union troops from the South after 1876, and imposition of Black Laws, Jim Crow segregation and KKK type enforcements, thus in effect nullifying the 13th, 14th & 15th amendments for nearly 100 years.