From December 1860 to April 1861, seven states left the Union, led by South Carolina four more did so after the war began, in April 1861, while four slaveholding states remained loyal. It came in response to Abraham LincolnвЂ™s election, the first of an openly antislavery candidate and party. The decision of slaveholding states to secede, to separate from the United States, was the culmination of a 30-year effort to protect the right to hold property in persons-the institution of slavery. Read: Growing up in the shadow of the Confederacy This is the cause that the statues honor. Emboldened by what they saw as the failure of emancipation in other parts of the world, buoyed by the new science of race, and convinced that the American vision of the people had been terribly betrayed, they sought the kind of future for human slavery and conservative republican government that was no longer possible within the United States. The Confederates built an explicitly white-supremacist, pro-slavery, and antidemocratic nation-state, dedicated to the principle that all men are not created equal.

was a big, centralized state, devoted to securing a society in which enslavement to white people was the permanent and inherited condition of all people of African descent. For the four years of its existence, until it was forced to surrender, the Confederate States of America was a pro-slavery nation at war against the United States. But the Confederacy is not part of вЂњour American heritage,вЂќ as President Donald Trump recently claimed, nor should it stand as a libertarian symbol of small government and resistance to federal tyranny. A century and a half of propaganda has successfully obscured the nature of the Confederate cause and its bloody history, wrapping it in myth. She is the author of Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South.ДЄmericans are now debating the fate of memorials to the Confederacy-statues, flags, and names on Army bases, streets, schools, and college dormitories. About the author: Stephanie McCurry is a professor of history at Columbia University.

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