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.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 