"It is impossible to point to any other local issue but slavery and say that Southerners would have seceded and fought…"

"All peoples part with their myths reluctantly, and historians are at some risk when they try to dismantle those of th…"

"Myths simply throw roadblocks in the path to enlightenment, and it is from truth that we have the most to learn. One …"

"In fact, the state rights defense of secession in 1860–1861 did not really appear in force until after 1865 as …"

"Legalistic Southerners tried to view the Constitution as a contract. Unfortunately, that viewpoint breaks down when v…"

"Always there had been the complicated factor of the one institution that peculiarly set the South apart from the Nort…"

"Southern states had embraced the Union only insofar as it served to protect their rights to hold property in slaves, …"

"Inextricably intertwined in the question was slavery, and it only became the more so in the years that followed. Soci…"

"So long as the number of slave states was the same as or greater than the number of free states, then in the Senate t…"

"Even in 1832 there were those in the South who confessed that the tariff was only a battlefield, not the war. If they…"