Ever since the end of the Civil War, Confederate apologists have put out the lie that the southern states seceded and southerners fought to defend an abstract constitutional principle of “states’ rights.” That falsehood attempts to sanitize the past. Every convention’s participants made it explicit: they were seceding because they thought secession would protect the future of slavery. Lincoln’s victory led Deep South slaveholders to claim that only secession could save the South from being “stripped,” as one Alabama editor, a former Douglas supporter, said, “of 25 hundred millions of slave
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