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But the Bible strongly opposes slavery for God's people, indeed it is one long anti-slavery document -- from Exodus out of Egypt to Jesus freeing all of us from slavery to sin. But your comment here shows that like everything else in Lost Cause mythology, claims that the Bible supports slavery are built on lies.

I think you have a good mind and I enjoy reading your comments. I realize that you are a true historian, (so is my daughter,) and that is partly what is moving you in all this.

It is certainly true about slavery, and our southern position was indefensible considering Philemon! Our hypocrisy was there to see, were we willing to be honest. We were outraged at the legal plunder by the Yankee tariffs, while ignoring that slavery is also, in another form, exactly that, legalized plunder! Holding slaves while attempting to evangelize them was such hypocrisy. "Thou shalt not steal" the labor of another man!

It was General Lee who ordered us to furl the flag. He set the example by NEVER participating in any such debates with the Yankees on moral justification for the lost cause. Other generals and especially the vice president were not so good or wise. The issue has been settled. As Lee would say, "God's will."

BTW if we "lost causers" would grant that the war was fought over slavery and that the war decided that issue and not secession, then we might better maintain that the issue of secession has not been settled and a philosophy of state rights might be resurrected in people's minds and hearts if it ever came to blows.

BDParrish: "...we might better maintain that the issue of secession has not been settled and a philosophy of state rights might be resurrected in people's minds and hearts if it ever came to blows."

The issue of secession is totally settled in my mind.
Our Founders proposed and practiced what we might call "secession" under two, but only two, conditions:

Necessity, as they experienced in 1776 forcing them to declare independence from the Brits.
Their Declaration makes clear it was necessity which drove them to declare unilateral unapproved Independence, not what James Madison later called "at pleasure".
Mutual Consent: but our Founders also proposed & practiced at pleasure "secession" in 1788, leaving the old Articles of Confederation to adopt their new Constitution -- by mutual consent.

Necessity and mutual consent were the two conditions which our Founders left to us for declaring "secession".
But no Founder ever proposed or consented to unilateral unapproved declaration of secession at pleasure, and yet that is what happened in late 1860 and early 1861.
It's simply fact that nothing in any 1861 "Reasons for Secession" document remotely resembled conditions spelled out in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, nor was there anyting remotely resembling the mutual consent of 1788.

Further, the key point that every Lost Causer tries to obscure (and in so doing identifies themselves as Lost Causers) is that secession alone did not cause Civil War.
Indeed, Lincoln promised in his March 4, 1861 Inaugural that secessionists could not have civil war unless they themselves started it.
And Jefferson Davis acknowledged (to Braxton Bragg) that it would be better to let the Union start war, but when Confederates were ready to attack Fort Sumter, that "better" would be outweighed by other considerations.

In short: it was more important to Davis to have a war, seizing Forts Sumter & Pickens, than to worry about maneuvering to make the Union start it.

And so the war came...

We were outraged at the legal plunder by the Yankee tariffs, while ignoring that slavery is also, in another form, exactly that, legalized plunder!

Enslaving fellow citizens is a breaking of the Compact known as the "Constitution." The enslavement of Blacks, while immoral, was completely legal under the system of government enacted in 1776 and that which was redesigned in 1787.

BTW if we "lost causers" would grant that the war was fought over slavery

Except in fact, the war was not fought over slavery. The Union kept Slave states operating within the Union for the entire duration of the war. Therefore their fight was not with slavery, but with those who sought independence of Washington/New York's economic control of their production.

That the war was about slavery was War Propaganda, but the existence of certain facts demonstrate to any reasonable man that slavery was not the reason the North sent men into the South to conquer them.