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This article takes the usual path of argument but in my opinion that path is misguided. We don't have to re-fight the Civil War or come up with contortionist theories that it wasn't about slavery. Of course it was. The abolitionist cause was moribund until the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott case. The spectacle of Southern slave catchers invading Northern states to grab slaves with the assistance of Federal authorities riled up the North, set the abolitionist movement on fire and directly led to the establishment of the Republican Party.

In my opinion, this is what we should be talking about:

How did we get from this to where we are now? The men who fought the war and saw their friends and comrades die in droves forgave each other and reconciled as Americans. But today people are bent on vengeance and denying any honor to those who fought for the South.

I think it's because much of America, like most of Europe, is now in a post-Christian era. Concepts of forgiveness, reconciliation and love of fellow man are foreign to many if not most Americans today. That's why the nation was shocked when the relatives of the Charleston victims readily forgave the murderer. In my lifetime we went from the Solid Democrat South to a mostly Republican South. The Democrats are out for their vengeance.

BTW, Lord Acton really didn't understand people who had strong feelings about slavery. A quote:

Democracy inevitably takes the tone of the lower portions of society, and, if there are great diversities, degrades the higher. Slavery is the only protection that has ever been known against this tendency, and it is so far true that slavery is essential to democracy…. This is a good argument too, in the interest of all parties, against the emancipation of the blacks.

It is impossible to understand the American Revolution without taking into account the impact of Tom Paine's Common Sense. Equally, it is impossible to understand the impulses which animated the North in the American Civil War without taking into account, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Rarely does our nation experience national convulsions over an act of Congress or a Supreme Court decision. I think Lincoln expressed it best when he said when greeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, "so you are the little lady that wrote the book that started this great war."

When one asks what were the ideological aims of the North in waging the war or in imposing reconstruction one has to ask, which Yankees, when? At the beginning Lincoln proclaimed the war aims to be the restoration of the union and explicitly wrote to Horace Greeley to the affect that he would preserve the union by abolishing slavery or by not abolishing slavery as expedient. Later when it was politically expedient both domestically and internationally Lincoln converted the war effort into one for the abolition of slavery by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. The race riots in New York and elsewhere made it quite clear that there was a huge part of the northern population unwilling to die to abolish slavery.

Likewise, reconstruction varied depending on the players and depending on the time in question. Certainly, the ideological aims of the radical Republicans of the House and Senate were quite different from the ideological aims of Pres. Johnson whom they impeached largely because he failed to impose their vision on the South. That vision included not just emancipation of African Americans but their enfranchisement-in the South but evidently not so much in the North.

As is recounted in my about page, the efforts to impose ideological aims on the South lapsed over time so that by 1876 radical Republican forces of occupation were withdrawn from the last two rebellious states and reconstruction was over giving way to a century of Jim Crow (to a very degree in the North as well as in the South). The ideological aims of the Republicans in ending reconstruction were apparently to put a Republican in the White House and at the cost of disenfranchising Negroes in southern districts. During occupation many of the ideological aims of the radical Republicans were secondary to ambition or greed.

Raising all these issues in the modern context of the southern battle flag may or may not be relevant. My objection to the national spasm we are currently experiencing has to do with a deliberate, even malicious, departure from historical reality and the elevation of victimhood and relativism with its evil twin subjectivism to legitimacy. Historic reality should not be dependent on ever shifting goalposts ceaselessly repositioned by professional victims. My rights do not depend on your feelings.

"How did we get from this to where we are now?"

It's because the Marxist Left and their Neo-commie fellow travelers hate the original America and wish to get rid of it. When Obama announced he was going to transform America this was part of what he had in mind. Promoting hatred for Southern history is just a first step in accomplishing it.

James V. Schall, S.J. taught political philosophy at Georgetown University for many years until recently retiring. He is the author of numerous books and countless essays on philosophy, theology, education, morality, and other topics. His most recent book is Reasonable Pleasures: The Strange Coherences of Catholicism (Ignatius Press). Visit his site, "Another Sort of Learning", for more about his writings and work.