Readers will be familiar with Murray Rothbard’s view that the Confederate States had a right to secede. This article will not revisit the secession debates, as the aim is to highlight three gaping holes in the revisionist claim that the Cornerstone Speech should be read as a defense of slavery.

First, the revisionist claim avers that the Confederate States supported slavery while the Union States were against slavery, failing to consider the fact that nine states who were still in the Union at the time of Stephens’ speech were slave states. Gene Kizer Jr points out that:

When Lincoln’s naval mission arrived in Charleston on April 12, 1861, it was one of five military missions sent into Southern waters by Abraham Lincoln in March and April to get the war started… There were nine slave states in the Union at that time because Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina had voted not to secede.

The natural law principle of self-ownership of all human beings has been addressed elsewhere; the point here is that the outrage over Stephens’ remarks overlooks a second gaping hole in the revisionist theory, namely, that Stephens’ views on race were held by both Confederates and Unionists. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln also defended white supremacy:

I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermingling with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior. I am as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

A third gaping hole in the revisionist theory is that Stephens’ view is also expressed by William T. Sherman, whose statue still stands proudly in New York City, and who is revered as a hero by court academics and historians. In “General Sherman, The Negro, and Slavery: The Story of An Unrecognized Rebel” Robert K. Murray outlines Sherman’s pro-slavery opinions. Sherman saw nothing wrong with slavery, and even advised his wife to purchase a slave. He also wrote to his wife that,

All Congresses on earth can’t make the negro any thing else than what he is; he must be subject to the white man, or he must amalgamate or be destroyed. Two such races cannot live in harmony save as master and slave.