By Lee A. Daniels

What were they thinking?

I’m referring to those three hundred or so whites who attended the Secession Gala in Charleston, South Carolina late last month on the exact 150th anniversary of South Carolina’s December 1860 secession from the United States.

Did they understand they were celebrating not just treason, but the exaltation of the basest sentiments human beings can hold toward one another? Do those three hundred people consider themselves American citizens? Do they pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands? If so, why, given that they continue to honor those who rebelled against the humanitarian and democratic principles the United States of America professed to stand for?

Oh, yes, officials of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a sponsor of the Gala, glibly parroted the words that ever since Appomattox have formed the lexicon of the romance of the Confederacy: “bravery,” “tenacity,” “heritage,” “honor” “states’ rights,” “freedom.”

Those words, of course, ignore the reality of the “way of life” the Antebellum South (and the U.S. as a whole during that era) depended on – Negro Slavery. They ignore the secession ordinances of the rebel states; and the blunt declarations of the founding document of the Confederacy, the Confederate Constitution of 1861, and its leaders

My favorite Confederate is Alexander H. Stephens, the Georgian who resigned from the Senate of the United States to become vice president of the breakaway region. On March 21, 1861, when the outbreak of war was all but certain, Stevens put the matter squarely to an enthusiastic throng at Savannah, Georgia in his infamous “Slavery, the Cornerstone of the Confederacy” speech.

“The prevailing ideas entertained by Thomas Jefferson and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the (United States),” he said, “were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature, that it was wrong in principle, social (sic), morally and politically.”

In contrast, Stephens went on to say, “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro (sic) is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and moral condition.”

Is it any wonder today’s Confederate sympathizers rarely, if ever, cite the actual words of the Confederacy’s political leaders, or even acknowledge their existence?

Many of the 167 readers who responded online to a New York Times column by two scholars about the Gala and the circumstances of South Carolina’s secession were scathing in their denunciation of the celebration. “It is appalling that someone would hold a ball to celebrate treason against the United States of America,” read one. “The celebrations of secession and the Confederacy … are morally reprehensible and un-American. Since when did it become acceptable to celebrate slavery and treason?” read another.

That volume of response – and its passionate tone – typifies the reactions to the news stories and opinion columns that are beginning to populate the media landscape as the nation marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

They, and the many books on the conflict now being published, and the symposia spreading throughout academia, all underscore a particular point.

The next time someone asks “Aren’t we post-racial yet?” or declares that 21st-century Americans have or should have “gotten over” thinking race and racism are significant factors in contemporary society, tell them America isn’t even “post-Civil War” yet.

And with good reason: for the great issues which exploded into war in the middle of the nineteenth century remain central to many Americans’ conception of themselves as individuals and of who else is an American.

True, the Civil War was in part a struggle between the North and the South for political and economic power. True, deeper still, the War played out the even larger battle between industrial capitalism and an essentially feudalistic form of capitalism.

But, at its heart the Civil War was about the future of the United States as a democracy. Lincoln in his famous “A House Divided” speech of 1858 put it plainly: “I believe this government cannot endure half slave and half free.”

That was the issue which came to be expressed in the bloody spectacle of 1861 to 1865. Was it actually true that America could not live half-slave and half-free? Did race as the sharpest point of difference between Americans, justify the profound hypocrisy White America practiced from 1619 to 1861: The colonial experience of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers convinced them to fight for freedom from British rule. Yet, they rooted their concept of liberty itself in depriving others – especially Native Americans and Africans and African Americans – of that inalienable right.

The history of the United States from the 1787 Constitutional Convention to the cannonade at Fort Sumter underscores that that moral, political and economic contradiction could not be sustained. But the history of the nation that emerged from the Civil War also underscores that the discussion about what it means to be an American still continues. Even a cursory glance at some of the controversies of the last decade – or the last year – makes that clear.

“Post-Civil War?”

Not yet.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.