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.

150 year anniversary

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. - Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, PA, November 19, 1863, as subsequently autographed and signed by Lincoln