Fracturing the Lens of History 0

For those of you who don’t understand how adherents of the Lost Cause can argue, even today, that slavery was not the cause of the American Civil War, I offer you this column in yesterday’s local rag.

The author employs a tactic which I remember from defenders of the Lost Cause during my youth, surrounded as I was by white folks whose ancestors wore the gray, as did my own, and who were distressed that the Civil Rights movement threatened Our Way of Life(TM).

He drags out the political minutiae of the last few months leading up to the war, creating a haze of detail about conventions and congresses and resolutions and proclamations, to avoid the ultimate truth:

If it were not for a desire to protect and perpetuate slavery, no Southern state would have seceded and no war would have ensued.

All the rest is sophistry, sophistry designed to avoid confronting the moral rottenness–the belief that some persons, because of the color of their skins, are destined by God to be bought, sold, and otherwise disposed of as property in perpetuity–at and in the heart of the Lost Cause.

A Sternly Worded Letter to the Editor has been dispatched.