On Tue, 19 Apr 2016 08:14:42 -0400, Keyser Söze
wrote:


Some years ago, PBS had such a discussion that produced the following
comments. From the PBS site:

Drew Gilpin Faust: (President, Harvard University): "Historians are
pretty united on the cause of the Civil War being slavery."

Walter Edgar (Professor of History, University of South Carolina): "the
169 men who voted to secede first from the Union said, in their
declaration of causes, that it was ... [to] protect slavery and their
other domestic institutions ... and the men of 1860 and 1861 in other
Southern states were pretty blunt about what they were doing [also]"

Edna Medford (Professor of History, Howard University: "there was that
... Southern perspective about the war: 'We may have lost the war, but
... it was such a noble cause for which we fight' ... now, to take that
position, you're sort of on the fringes of historiography."

Slavery was the major cause of the Civil War. And as Gary Stein put it,
the "States' Rights" that people talk about as an alternative cause were
first and foremost about allowing states to perpetuate the institution
of slavery.

You don't think "Howard University" might have a little bit of a
slant?
What does Cornell West say? ;-)