Recently, my 11-year-old grandson told me that they were studying the Civil War. Although I’m not a big fan of the Civil War, I wanted to be an attentive grandfather, so I asked him what he had learned.

“That it wasn’t over slavery,” he said. “It was over states’ rights.”

After reminding him that his primary job was to get to the sixth grade in good order and that there was little to be gained by debating with his teacher (or trying to make an argument on a test), I told him that I disagreed with that version and that—so far as I was concerned—it was one of two or three revisionist theories that attempt to either sanitize southern history or demonize it.

He appeared to accept what I said, or at least he didn’t choose to debate it.

Then, last week when I was combing through The Sing to see how many inconsistencies and typos we had missed in the first five proofings, I came upon this:

River Falls became a town just a few years after the end of what some people still called “the War of Northern Aggression.” The people there had been involved in the war on battlefields as far away as Pennsylvania and as close as their own farms. They weren’t fighting to keep their slaves; there were only a few holdings in the county large enough to either need or support them. The largest landowner in what became River Falls made do by having a dozen children. But the farmers did see the need to fight because it seemed like somebody was trying to change the way they lived. And they resisted that on principal.

For a moment, I was confused. I knew both of these things—what I had told Quinn and what I had written— to be true, but at first glance they appeared to be contradictory. But that lasted only for a moments, because the seeming contradiction was cleared up by one of the great truths of national warfare: The people in power start the war, then leave it to others to fight and die in it. The fact was that most of the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy didn’t come from plantations; they came from small farms. And they weren’t fighting to keep the slaves that they had never had; they were fighting because they had been told that they must to keep what they did have.

It was also a fact that, for the most part, people who worried about such a thing accepted that the War was about slavery. That’s especially true of the politicians. In 1837, John C. Calhoun delivered a speech entitled “Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions,” in which he said that the abolitionists were tearing the country apart.  He also said:

I appeal to facts. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually. It came among us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions, reviled as they have been to its present comparatively civilized condition. This, with the rapid increase of numbers, is conclusive proof of the general happiness of the race, in spite of all the exaggerated tales to the contrary.

Yet, there were prominent people throughout the South who said that if the slave population wasn’t forcefully held down, they’d rise up and kill the whites. (In 1848, the Baptists were asked if it was Christian to beat slaves. After due deliberation, the Baptists concluded it was.)

In this case, the points of contention (and the aims of the Abolitionists) were banning slavery in the District of Columbia and prohibiting slave trade across state lines. Thirteen years later, when he was too ill to deliver it, Calhoun had a colleague read what is remembered by historians as his most famous speech. Near the end he says:

Unless something decisive is done, I again ask, What is to stop this agitation before the great and final object at which it aims—the abolition of slavery in the States—is consummated? Is it, then, not certain that if something is not done to arrest it, the South will be forced to choose between abolition and secession? Indeed, as events are now moving, it will not require the South to secede in order to dissolve the Union. Agitation will of itself effect it, of which its past history furnishes abundant proof--as I shall next proceed to show

At this point, South Carolina had already threatened succession once and had advanced something called the “Nullification Doctrine,” which held that states could nullify any federal law that it didn’t agree with.

For years, much of the energy of the legislative branch (and some of the energy of the judicial branch) was spent trying to hold the Union together. They passed the Missouri Comprise, which accepted Maine into the union along with Missouri. In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled that an African-American could not be a citizen and had no standing to sue. When the Kansas-Nebraska act opened the territories for settlement, pro-slavery settlers and anti-slavery settlers poured in, hoping to determine slavery’s future in the state.

Politicians spent a lot of time on the South’s so-called “peculiar institution.”

Which might strike some future researchers as odd, considering that most Southerners did not have a dog in this particular fight. Estimates of the number of southerners who owned slaves range from 5% to 30%. In any case, it was such a minority that the South could not have gone to war if only slave holders were fighting. So those who owned slaves found a way to make those who didn’t willing to fight. It was fear of loss. Loss of life. Loss of status. Loss of opportunity.

Pretty much the same thing that happens today.

All my life I’ve been told that blacks want something I have. This is an exchange I had in the 1960s in a bar in Atlantic City, New Jersey. It was after a long day working a meeting of Catholic school officials. Almost everybody was in black and white. My associate and I went to the hotel bar for a quiet drink, but the bartender was not into quiet. He wanted to talk about race. At one point, he said, “You know what they all want, don’tcha?”

“Don’t say they want our women,” I said.

“That’s right. They want our women.”

I’ve also been told how dangerous they are. And how they’ll take our jobs. It’s never said, but at the base of it all is the fear that they’ll take our status. If we have no one to look down on, where will we be.

And, I think, that’s the biggest fear that the slave-owning population used to get the people of my home county to fight and die for something that primarily benefitted the rich.

In 150 years, we’ve learned very little.