Long-ago rewritten history

I disagree with this guy's conclusions concerning what should be done about this issue today, but this is the second place I've read about the misunderstanding of the role of states' rights in the Civil War. These two articles have confirmed my own new insight on the roots of the war based on my recent first reading of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The southern states adamantly opposed northern states' rights to not support the institution of slavery, particularly the Fugitive Slave Act and the move to prevent new territories from starting with a bias toward slavery. The primary issue over which they seceded seems to have been to preserve and expand their economic model which was strongly based on slavery and the fear of what would happen to their way of life should slavery be abolished.

We - well, well-schooled lawyers, anyway - can argue all day about whether states had at that time or today have a right to secede from the United States of America. If so, that would probably make the Civil War technically about states' rights. But there is strong evidence supporting the slavery issue as far and away the motivating reason for southern states' secession. They wanted to preserve their own rights to their slave "property" - along with the economic model that came with it - and (particularly) force northern states to recognize slave owners' right to own and recover their slaves the same as any other property over which they might retain possession when it passed within another states' borders. They also wanted new territories to be allowed to govern themselves on the slavery model even before they reached the less-federally-controlled status which came with statehood, if the (white) residents of the territory so wished.

In our free nation, I will simultaneously defend your individual right to display the confederate flag as an expression of what it represents to you and try to help you understand why many view it as a symbol of racial oppression. I will also help you to understand that your free speech rights come with the same consequences to which all of our speech is always subject, and none of us is free from the court of public opinion. I am largely of the opinion that state and local governments have no more business flying it than they do the flag of the United Kingdom.