In my family, the Civil War was fought so one brother could keep the other enslaved

wrote a piece for the Texas Observer about a plaque, since removed, that had hung in the Texas Capitol since 1959. Placed there by the Children of the Confederacy, it pledged to “study and teach the truths of history (one of the most important of which is that the war between the states was not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery).”

This was a lie. Sustaining slavery was reason for the Civil War. Yet in 2020, defenders of the Confederacy continue to deny what the creators of the Confederacy admitted in 1861 and 1862: Slavery was why they were seceding.

In his farewell speech to the U.S. Senate, Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy, said:

“Had the Declaration announced that the negroes were free and equal, how was the Prince to be arraigned for stirring up insurrection among them? And how was this to be enumerated among the high crimes which caused the colonies to sever their connection with the mother country? When our Constitution

was formed, the same idea was rendered more palpable, for there we find provision made for that very class of persons as property; they were not put upon the footing of equality with white men — not even upon that of paupers and convicts; but, so far as representation was concerned, were discriminated against as a lower caste, only to be represented in the numerical proportion of three fifths.”

In “The Cornerstone Speech,” Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s vice president, said:

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Declarations of Secession by states that made up the Confederacy specifically mentioned slavery. The Texas declaration said, “She was received as a commonwealth, holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery — the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits — a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy.”

Isn’t being true to history part of respecting heritage?

Shouldn’t Confederate defenders who speak so often and passionately about heritage believe the words of Davis, Stephens and the men who wrote the declarations of secession? These men whose heritage they celebrate and who told us in real time of their belief in white supremacy and black inferiority, and that the preservation of slavery was why they were seceding from the Union.

The denial of slavery as the primary reason for secession and the Civil War will be more difficult in this new reckoning of history, a period in which a statue of Robert