I can't believe they are talking about the apeman without this:
"The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history... the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination -- that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE ANYTHING MORE UNTRUE. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves." --H.L. Mencken
As long as you agree that adults should have the same rights as children playing in a sand box, Mencken is pprobably right.
Walt
The Confederacy did not fight for the right of "the people" of the seceding states to govern themselves. This implies that "all" the people of the southern states were included in this group.
They rather fought for the right of one group of southerners to continue their immoral dominance over other groups of southerners. This primarily meant blacks, but also included all Unionist southerners, a surprisingly numerous group, especially in those areas where plantation slavery was uneconomical. Loud laments are heard about the violations of civil rights by the evil Lincoln and his followers, yet the far more numerous and murderous attacks on Unionist southerners are seldom mentioned.