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One of the major causes of the war, and among the chief motivating factors behind the deep Southern commitment to the fight evidenced by the widespread volunteerism of the so-called “Southern yeoman” who owned no slaves and had no stake in slavery, was the smug presumption to moral and even spiritual superiority of so many in the North, abolitionists and New Enlganders in particular. The stench of condescension and hypocrisy was particularly foul to Southerners of the day, which is not surprising since so many of them were of “Scots Irish” descent and within at most three generations of having escaped the grinding poverty and horrific political oppression of a Great Britain which reviled them. So the South as a whole tended to have a chip on its shoulder about anything which smacked of the establishment, entitlement or the upper class. In short, the North. You can't continually insult a man – or a region – and pretend surprise when he wants to step outside with you.

This is a casus belli which has been routinely overlooked by Northern commentators, many of whom today persist in the same offensive, contemptuous behavior which came so naturally to their forbears, particularly academics. As self-identified members of the elite and claimants to membership in the intelligentsia, they were representatives of that entitled class which led the North, and as such were simply incapable of recognizing their own egoism, prejudice and presumption. These representatives of the Northern elites were far more likely to understand Swahili than they were to grasp what it meant to live a Southerner's life, and to understand the factors which formed his character and personality.

As I noted, that same egotistical presumption and condescension is today routinely seen in the intellectual heirs of those elites who were so contemptuous of the South both prior to the North's military invasion and afterwards, when the South was crushed and humiliated for generations, unlike any other foe defeated by the United States. The most smug and condescending attitudes often come from academics, who rely on the same insulting behavior and presumptuous attitudes when speaking of today's South and its inhabitants. Often these academics retain the same smug pretensions of moral superiority as did their forbears. And, just as their forbears, they can exhibit a truly breathtaking hypocrisy and shocking degree of willful moral blindness, by praising as military geniuses and heroes men who intentionally made war on civilians, which included the same acts of barbarism, brutality and outright terrorism for which Nazi and Imperial Japanese generals were ignominiously hanged. Just think of the vanity necessary to accomplish such a neat intellectual trick.

Yes, such attitudes are still encountered today, when the same kind of moral egotists speak in terms of “lies” and “myths” on which Southerners “loudly” “insist”. Because Southerners don't just have a different opinion – they're not even merely in error. No, they're perverse. Immoral. Evil. The familiar smug, scornful and patronizing words. And informed by the same narcissism and moral blindness which afflicted those who went before them.