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i think it came as something of a shock
two southerners to realize that their institution had not only been abolished but discredited
in the eyes of the world
and if that institution was discredited in the eyes of the world
%uh then the confederacy itself
%uh would be discredited in the eyes of history
so it became a psychological necessity i think for them to deny that the war was about slavery
that they were fighting for the
preservation
%uh defense perpetuation
of that institution
and so they developed a a series of alternative explanations
%uh for their
their raison d'tre
their reason for existence and states rights became one of those
a kind of cultural nationalism
%uh
became %uh explanation for the south was different
%uh it ought to have the right to govern itself
%uh and that they had fought for this right of self government
and the desire to create a new kind of %uh nationalism
in the twentieth century which was furthered by the spanish-american war in eighteen ninety
eight when
actually two
former confederate generals one of them the nephew of robert e lee became generals in
the united states army
%um it was furthered by world war one
%uh it was furthered by such movies as birth of a nation in nineteen fifteen
where a southern director presenting a southern point of view in this film nevertheless portrayed
lincoln as a hero and as the civil war as the real birth of this new united northern
and southern nation
%uh so i think that that was the principal reason
%uh why
through the last decade or so of the nineteenth century and probably much of the first half
of the twentieth century you get this %uh
kind of consensus among northern and southern historians
%uh that this was a noble moment in american history and let's just forget about these
issues that might continue to divide us today
and %uh look at the positive parts of that history
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