From Indigo Nights: "For the South, these folks tell me the issues leading 
up to the Civil War were more related to states' rights (from the 
perspective of the South) than
anything else."

As a child of the South, with two dead Confederate grandfathers on my 
mother's side, I well grew up with the states rights argument. In fact, 
while I do not remember the Dixiecrat rebellion, in 1952 as a young 
enthusiast of politics, I urge everyone I could find to vote for Eisenhower 
because he supported "States Rights" and would let Texas and Louisiana to 
keep the mineral rights to off shore oil drilled out to the Spanish 3 league 
limit, ca. 30 miles, not the standard US 3 mile international limit.

Imagine my shock when I learn during the 2004 Democratic convention that the 
argument which split the Democratic Convention of 1860 was the Southerners 
insistence that there be a party plank that the Federal government would not 
only allow Blacks captured in the North to be returned to the South (on the 
assumption by the South that all Blacks were runaway slaves) but that the 
Federal government would actively seek and return slaves to the South.

That meant that what John C Calhoun considered "States Rights" to protect 
"their Peculiar Institution" meant Southerners wanted the States Rights of 
the Free States to be violated at the expense of all taxpayers. That detail 
about the aftermath of the Dred Scott decision was never taught in the 
textbooks of the South.

I agree there are those who believe that States Rights was the primary thing 
the Southerners were protecting (or Granddaddy, should I say we 
Southerners?), but they do not choose to analyze that gravitated around the 
right to have slavery.

Many do get interested in a broader history once they get past the 
geneology, and in Texas a past State President was the descendant of a slave 
who won his freedom fighting for the CSA, but they can easily fall prey to 
people who want to play Scalett O'Hara (Daughters of the Confederate 
Veterans) or perpetuators of some of the negative "ideals" of the South. It 
can be tricky ground to trod.

I find just plane living history reenactor more open minded.

Mary L. Kirby
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