[Rockingham]

Even as the elite of the Old South wanted to preserve slavery and went to war over it, they recognized its moral opprobrium. Like lawyers with a bad case, Confederate partisans then (and now) try to confuse the issue with claims about tariffs and sectional oppression and obscurantism.

Rejecting the work of historians in the field as biased and wrong-minded and rummaging about for supposed support in original sources is obsessive crankery.

[FLT-bird]

Even as the elite of the Old South wanted to preserve slavery and went to war over it, they recognized its moral opprobrium. Like lawyers with a bad case, Confederate partisans then (and now) try to confuse the issue with claims about tariffs and sectional oppression and obscurantism. Rejecting the work of historians in the field as biased and wrong-minded and rummaging about for supposed support in original sources is obsessive crankery.

Except they didn't either secede or go to war over slavery. Slavery was not threatened in the US. Unionist propaganda late in the war was that it was "all about slavery" because the Lincoln administration needed some kind of political cover for starting what he thought was going to be a walkover but what turned out to be a bloodbath.

After the war, this wartime propaganda and attendant hysteria was soon forgotten. It was only a century later when the 1960s Leftists came along and started their "long march through the institutions" that the all about slavery myth was revived in order to serve their political purposes. Only Yankees desperate to cling to their false sense of superiority and ignorant Leftists actually believe it.