As for those who wish to engage in a spirited defense of the Confederacy, I'm pleased to let them put down in writing, in public, their support for that dastardly conspiracy against human rights and the nation. History has proven them wrong.
Few authors and commentators on the war have dared present one basic fact that overthrows the myth of Yankee beneficence toward the slaves. On 2 March 1861, the 36th U. S. Congress (minus, of course, the seven seceded states of the Deep South) passed by a two-thirds majority a proposed amendment to the Constitution. Had it been ratified by the requisite number of states before the war intervened and signed by President Lincoln (who looked favourably on it as a way to lure the Southern states back into the Union), the proposed 13th Amendment would have prohibited the U. S. government from ever abolishing or interfering with slavery in any state.
The proposed 13th Amendment reads: "No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."
Note well that this amendment was designed to be unrepealable (i.e. "No amendment shall be made . . . .") This gives the lie to claims that a righteous North went to war in 1861 to free the slaves. Moreover, it undermines the claim that the South seceded to preserve the institution of slavery. If that had been the South's goal, then what better guarantee did it need than an unrepealable amendment to the Constitution to protect slavery as it then existed?
Read Jefferson's and the Founders ideas of State's rights. You know ... small limited government with primary right of self-determination belonging to the States?! AND the right to seceed if they didn't feel the government was acting on their behalf! After all, that's what representative government is all about. Representative is the key word here boyo!