In an editorial presented by Pres Kabacoff in the Memorial Day edition of the Baton Rouge Advocate, Mr. Kabacoff commits several errors. With due respect, they are common errors and not necessarily his alone.
There is an important difference between a “Lost Cause” and a “Cause Lost.” A lost cause implies that the action taken by a state to secede is legally faulty at the start. Yet even to this day there is no prescribed constitutional permission or restriction about a state having the right to secede or not to secede. When the Southern states embarked on secession it was a “cause” they believed lawful. Other states in the union of states believed otherwise and history shows that the contest of a state’s right to secede would ultimately be temporarily decided between the states on the battlefield.
The South lost that secession cause in that battle between states. However, the South could have won? Consequently, logic tells us that a state’s right to secede is still unsettled constitutional law because an issue decided at war is not constitutional law. Laws are written, and secession laws are yet undecided.
On the point that the removal of the monuments in New Orleans was necessary, Mr. Kabacoff states it was necessary because they were an “insult” to “chattel slavery.” Mr. Kabacoff needs to read more history. The proximate “cause” of the War between the States was secession, not slavery. President Lincoln added slavery as a later issue.
The monuments of those who fought in the War between the States are testaments to the heroics of 262,000 Southern military who gave up a life to a cause “lost.” But it was not a ”Lost Cause.”