To the old Union they had said that the Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state. To their new nation they would de… - William C. Davis

Southern states had embraced the Union only insofar as it served to protect their rights to hold property in slaves, and to spread slavery as the nation expanded and the institution itself became intertwined as a defining element in the struggle for national power itself. In slavery could not spread as new states were formed, then the existing slave states would be doomed to perpetual minority in representation in Congress, guaranteeing that if the day came when Northern antipathy to slavery itself became hot enough, the majority could use the government to subvert the Constitution and abolish the institution where it already existed. In short, the South could not affort to lose any battle over slavery, nor even over issues on its periphery.

All peoples part with their myths reluctantly, and historians are at some risk when they try to dismantle those of the Confederacy.

Always there had been the complicated factor of the one institution that peculiarly set the South apart from the North, slavery...