GEE, YOU MIGHT HAVE STUMBLED INTO WHY THE RIGHT DEFENDS THEM:

The Richmond statue of Lee, which Virginia governor Ralph Northam has said is coming down, has long been a point of contention. Its 1890 unveiling was a key moment in the creation of a cult of Lee as a man of "moral strength and moral beauty," as a speaker put it that day.

Frederick Douglass appropriately scorned this movement. "It would seem," he wrote sarcastically, "that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven."

The apotheosis of Lee was an element of a Lost Cause mythology that maintained that the Civil War wasn't truly about slavery, only Southern states defending their legitimate prerogatives.

Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, would have scoffed at this. In his notorious Cornerstone Speech in 1861, he said the new government was built on "the great truth" of slavery.

The theory of states' rights that the Confederacy used to justify secession wasn't meant to preserve our constitutional scheme, but to demolish it. The idea had been developed by former vice president John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who believed the country had set off on an erroneous, nationalist path from the very beginning.

Besides, the South supported states' rights only to the extent that they were useful in protecting slavery. It insisted, after all, on a federal Fugitive Slave Act.

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