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Slavery was the issue, according to those who actually led the secession. I'll take their words over modern-day revisionists.

There's an interesting scene in the movie Gettysburg, prior to Pickett's Charge. Armistead is pointing out various Virginians in his division to the Brit officer. The pedigrees of some of the soldiers in the Viriginia ranks was astonishing. I can't believe that all those sons of the Founders were motivated by 'radical notions of forcing slavery on their neighbors'.

It was pretty easy to slander them all after many of them died charging Cemetery Ridge, though.

One aspect of history that I like to ponder is what happens to a society when a conqueror slaughters the best men of that society (as a conqueror often has to do). It was pretty easy to paint the beaten American Indians as dirty drunken thieves after we killed their chiefs and holy men. The Nazis and the Jews, Stalin and the Poles, etc., etc.

I wouldn't gloat too hard on the Confederates, because the gloating puts you in some pretty seamy company.

I have relatives who died in Picketts charge. On both sides of the stone wall.

I'm not "gloating". And like I said, the war had consequences I don't really care for.

As for the founders, I don't know many of them, North or South, who were defenders of slavery in anything but the "we're stuck with it and we don't know how to get out of it" sense.

Have you read Lincoln's Coopers Union speech? It was his introduction to national politics. In it he tracks the writing, and the voting records, of those who ratified the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

There was a solid majority who had voted to restrict the expansion of slavery.

But by the 1820s, perhaps as a part of Jackson's extension of the franchise, the politicians of the South no longer saw slavery as an unfortunate inheritence, but as a positive good, and a fundamental right that justified violence in response to any attempt to restrict it.

Read the secession declarations. They weren't angry about industrial policy, or immigration, or tariffs. They were angry about slavery - they were outraged that the North had made it clear that it would not stand for the extension of slavery beyond those states where it already existed.

And for that, they began a war.

The problem of this endless debate, and the Southern (and Northern, actually) revisionists is a failure to distinguish between the various State governments' reasons for secession and war, vs. individual officers and soldiers reasons--which of course were often different.

I think its unarguable, from what I've seen of official state secession documents, and the political debates at the time--POLITICALLY it WAS all about slavery. At the same time, men of honour like Lee, Jackson, and others, including most of the southern troops--it was about states rights, and thought of as a "2nd War of Independence." For many common soldiers the reason for fighting was summed up well by Shelby Foote, quoting a Confederate soldier's answer to a Yankee's question as to why, "I'm fighting 'cause y'all are HERE."

Of course after the War, Southerners remembering the hundreds of thousands dead--wanting to remember the best of them, skewed the memory, glossing over the political debates, and just remembering (the best) of the individual soldiers motivations--which like in most wars, on both sides, were unselfish and honourable.

I don't doubt that there are many Iraqi and Arab combatants in Iraq now (and many who were killed) who, being brainwashed by Saddam and Arab pan-nationalism, fought our troops with, in their own mind, honourable motivations...seeing us as infidel invaders, who would steal their land and their women. Of course that doesn't make it so, does it?

The same principle holds true for the "Lost Cause."

As the great grandson of a Confederate officer, I just wish more Southerners would get over it however--had the South not been so arrogant and stubborn, at the political level--perhaps the war could have been avoided, and slavery ended peacefully, without the needless waste of nearly a million good men. The USA would be more democratic and constituional today for certain, but for the evil of the War Between the States.