150 years later, still the wrong side of history.

There are times when being for the underdog places you squarely on the wrong side of history. So it was when I was a kid, just after the Civil War centennial observance. At a tender, impressionable age, I viewed the Lost Cause favorably, but fortunately I grew up, and have regretted the mistaken identification ever since. It would be pleasant to think that we, as a nation, might finally get this one right.

Gone With the Myths, by Edward Ball (New York Times)

... I can testify about the South under oath. I was born and raised there, and 12 men in my family fought for the Confederacy; two of them were killed. And since I was a boy, the answer I’ve heard to this question, from Virginia to Louisiana (from whites, never from blacks), is this: “The War Between the States was about states’ rights. It was not about slavery.”

I’ve heard it from women and from men, from sober people and from people liquored up on anti-Washington talk. The North wouldn’t let us govern ourselves, they say, and Congress laid on tariffs that hurt the South. So we rebelled. Secession and the Civil War, in other words, were about small government, limited federal powers and states’ rights.

But a look through the declaration of causes written by South Carolina and four of the 10 states that followed it out of the Union — which, taken together, paint a kind of self-portrait of the Confederacy — reveals a different story. From Georgia to Texas, each state said the reason it was getting out was that the awful Northern states were threatening to do away with slavery.