Don't Put Slavery in the Flag: "More broadly, the spinners say that the Civil War was about states’ rights, or taxes, or tariffs or the meaning of the Constitution. Indeed, it was about all those things. But at bottom the South seceded, not over some abstract notion of states’ rights, but over the right of the Southern states to practice human slavery. As Gov. James S. Gilmore III of Virginia put it in his proclamation commemorating the Civil War, “Had there been no slavery, there would have been no war.” Mississippi didn’t go to war for lower tariffs or for constitutional theory; it went to war to protect white Mississippians’ right to buy and sell black Mississippians."

Right. Take slavery out of the mix, and we have strident speeches, but few southern young men are cleaning their guns to fight over constitutional theory.

This essay cuts right through the ridiculous racism of the confederate flag controversy.