https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcy7qV-BGF4
I don’t post this because I agree with it. I post it show that maybe, just maybe the cause of secession was bit more complicated than we think, just maybe.
You can always find someone who will retroactively apply some less ignoble cause onto the Confederacy. But the fact still stands that when the very people who seceded chose to publicly document exactly why they seceded, they cited slavery and white supremacy as their principal reasons, and also explicitly stated their direct opposition to the general principle of States’ Rights, only supporting it in a narrow sense as it applied specifically to the ownership of slaves. Looking for additional evidence when such plain and unambiguous documentation already exists seems like searching for a way to support a conclusion that’s already been reached. It’s like calling World War II “The War of Polish Aggression” long after everyone knows Germany fired the first shots, or that the Poles were the real aggressors because they failed to surrender quickly enough after Germany laid claim to their territory. There’s a really clear agenda behind the ridiculous level of re-framing and denial you see around the Civil War. The Confederacy was the aggressor and attacked the United States, that part’s indisputable. And it was about slavery and white supremacy, based on what the Confederates said it was about at the time.
All of that is a little beside the point of Confederate statues, which were erected during the Reign of Terror (the Jim Crow era), not by Confederates themselves, but by those who had largely given up on the idea of slavery and instead focused on white supremacy, suppressing voting rights, segregation, lynching, etc. The cause of the Confederate statues has very little to do with slavery and more to do with supporting the domestic terror campaign that erupted after the end of Reconstruction.