20. Before and During the Civil War, Confederates Openly Stated That They Were Fighting for Slavery Because They Were Oblivious to How Bad That Sounded to Others
Examples such as the preceding illustrate that slavery and the supremacist views that underpinned it were unambiguously at the heart of the Confederate states’ decision to fight the Civil War. After the war, however, Confederate apologists and peddlers of the Lost Cause myth resorted to revisionism to pretend that something so clear-cut was instead shrouded in nonexistent ambiguity. Their reason was not difficult to understand: to defend slavery is an icky and morally bankrupt excuse to go to war against one’s country – and lose.
When the Southern states seceded, Southerners had been immersed in what we would call a bubble today, in which they had told each other for years and years, and convinced themselves, that slavery was a good thing. They genuinely did not comprehend how morally repugnant their way of life and “peculiar institution” seemed to much of the rest of the world. Specifically the Western world, the only one whose opinion mattered to them. So they honestly said why they chose to fight, oblivious to how horrible it sounded to outsiders.
