Pennsylvania (1842), in which the US Supreme Court ruled that state authorities could not be forced to help return fugitive slaves to the South. 24, 1860, its government issued a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” In it, South Carolinian leaders aired objections to laws in Northern states-specifically, those that sprung from the case of Prigg v. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. It’s a provision that clashes jarringly with neo-Confederate mythos-how could the South secede to preserve states’ rights if its own constitution mandated legal, federally protected slavery across state borders? “In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.” Only 38% of those surveyed attribute the conflict to slavery. This attitude is also reflected in a Pew Research Center poll from that same year, which found that nearly half (48%) of all Americans agreed: the Civil War was fought over states’ rights. Loewen, published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, found that 55% to 75% of American teachers-“regardless of region or race”-cite states’ rights as the chief reason for Southern secession. Just how pervasive are these Confederate mythologies? An informal survey conducted in 2011 by James W. Confederate denialism, in the form of states’ rights advocacy, permits sentimentalists to keep their questionable imagery without having to address its unsavory associations. “It’s about heritage”-forgetting, intentionally perhaps, that slavery and its decade-spanning echoes are very much a part of the collective American heritage. “It’s about Southern pride,” they insist. It’s a self-delusion some use to justify neo-Confederate pride: stars-and-bars bumper stickers, or remnants of Confederate iconography woven into some of today’s state flags.
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