Here is a reminder, if anyone really needed it, of what whites in the South thought the Civil War was about. It comes in a letter from Bob Love, the brother-in-law of Will Thomas, written to his father in December 1860, on the eve of South Carolina’s vote to secede from the Union:
“Before tomorrow’s sun goes down, this great union of ours will be dissolved….In less than thirty days from now there will be war in this happy land of ours. When will it stop. The abolitionists say that the southern people are all fools and rascals in saying that they are better than a negro. They say that they will put the negro on an equality with the white man, if they have to do it at the cannon’s mouth. The south says they will die before they will be put on an equality with negroes. And so the fight commences…. Let it come. We will be ready for it.”
And so began the deadliest war fought in the continental U.S., on the grand principle of… absolute and unalterable white supremacy.
