While I’m at it, on the subject of Civil War myths, might as well tackle the granddaddy of them all. The notion, first lofted about 1890 or so, that the South seceded from the Union in assertion of its states rights.
There was just enough of that involved in 1860-61 to make later claims of its primacy plausible for the forgetful. Now a new book hangs the Lost Causers with their own documents.
Historians have long preached the need to go to primary documents (sometimes government papers, often eye-witness diaries and letters) to understand history. Moreover, they want us to know that the study of history is an ongoing plunge, as sociologist/historian James W. Loewen wrote in his popular 1996 book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong into “arguments, issues and controversy.”
In his new book, The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader, Loewen quotes the original documents the seceding states and their prominent politicians issued in 1860-61 in which they expressly said that protection of slavery was their primary motivation for secession and that they were explicitly opposed to the “states rights” of Northern states to tamper with it by refusing to enforce the federal Fugitive Slave law.
Nor do you have to take Loewen’s word for it. All of the original documents are available on the Web. Google this: “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.”
He also shows that only long after the war did states rights become the “politically correct” motive for secession and still is taught in K-12, because textbook publishers, as Loewen reiterates what he wrote in “Lies…,” try to avoid controversy for fear their books will be rejected by state approval committees.
You don’t need to believe that all Rebel privates and junior officers were fighting for slavery (I don’t) in order to understand that the politicians and many generals who ran the Confederacy were doing exactly that.
Loewen further quotes the repeated (primary document) words of those leaders refusing to contemplate using slaves as soldiers, in order to debunk recent fantasies that thousands of black Americans fought for the Confederacy.
Once again, as he did so eloquently and above all evenhandedly in “Lies…,” Loewen wades into contemporary arguments with primary document evidence, which ought to challenge his detractors to come up with primary contradictory evidence, if they can.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
Thanks Dick for this post about Loewen’s latest book. I remember his “Lies my Teacher Told Me”. It sounds like he has another good history with “The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader”. He has got it correctly that it was concern over slavery, especially the question of the expansion of slavery into Territories that caused the seven states of the Cotton South to suceed after Lincoln’s election. Lincoln and the Republicans were committed only to keeping slavery out of the Territories. Linocln repeatedly said that the Republicans were not going to interfer with slavery where it already existed and even said as President, he would enforce the unpopular Furgitive Slave Law. (A stand that caused the Abolitionist Wendell Phillips to denounce Lincoln as “The slave hound of Illinois”!) It was the question of the expansion of Slavery along with hysteria that anybody the least bit critical of their “Peculiar Institution” was another John Brown that drove the southern states to suceed in the winter of 1860-61. An act of suicide that ended up destroying the very thing, slavery that they were trying to protect.
The Confederate apologists that the Cvil War was about States Rights is a phoney. In the 1850s when the South was still the dominate force in the Federal Govt, southerners were in favor of expanding Federal power when it concerned capturing furgitive slaves. Then it was many of the northern states that favored states rights and passed their personal liberty laws that interferred in the carrying out of the Federal Furgitive Slave Law of 1850!
The real purpose of State Rights is an arguement by those states or sections that fear the actions of the federal govt. are against their own interests. The New England States threaten succession during the War of 1812 because it involved war with their primary trading partners Britain and Canada.
The South has welcomed federal help in the past as long as it did not threaten their system of white supremacy, slavery in the antebullum era; Jim Crow during the late 19th & first half of the 20th Century. Southern politicians welcomed the New Deal with it rural electricfication, farm supports, public health programs, public works and above all the TennesseValley Authority that brought electricity to so many people. As long as Segregation was respected and FDR was careful to do that, southern whites welcomed the explansion of federal power into the south, seeing it as breaking the post Civil War economic system that favored the North and helping the South to develop economically.
(Apologize for these comments coming so late after the original post. )
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