Referring to one such speech, Mosby reacted: “Why not talk about witchcraft if as he said, slavery was not the cause of the war. I always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarrelled with the North about. I never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery.” Mosby spurned virtually all Lost Cause arguments about slavery. “I can’t see how setting the negroes free could have saved the Union,” he remarked in 1894, “unless slavery was the cause of the breach.”
