"Protection of Slavery From the Perceived Threat to Its Long-Term Survival Posed by Lincoln’s Election in 1860 Was, in Fact, the Dominant Theme in Secessionist Rhetoric"

"As Gary Gallagher notes in his introduction to The Myth of the Lost Cause, 'White Southerners emerged from the Civil War thoroughly beaten but largely unrepentant.' Some proponents of the Lost Cause remained candid about the racial ideology that sustained the Confederacy. The unrepentant Edward Pollard, wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner, wrote the first history of the Confederacy, with the appropriate title The Lost Cause. The war had ended slavery, Pollard acknowledged, but it 'did not decide negro equality…. This new cause—or rather the true question of the war revived—is the supremacy of the white race.'¹⁷ In a speech to Confederate veterans in 1890, a former captain in the 7th Georgia Volunteer Infantry echoed Pollard: 'We fought for the supremacy of the white race in America.'"

In a 2001 New York Review of Books article, James M. McPherson looks at publications concerning the cause of the Civil War.