Several readers have taken issue with this point I made earlier: considering Confederates to be traitors is the error of presentism, which is judging past generations by standards in effect today. Not true, they’ve said; Confederates were widely called traitors by Unionists. This is true, and I should have been more clear earlier. I wanted only to say that it seems to me an error to impute conscious treason to Southerners of 1860 who chose secession. It is not clear to me that average Southerners would have seen that their primary loyalty was to the Union, as opposed to their state, and an understanding of the Constitution that provided states the right to withdraw from the Union. The issue was not necessarily as clear in the minds of people who lived in the South as it is for us contemporary Americans, north and south.

Interestingly, I read over the weekend that before Lee surrendered at Appomattox, one of his top lieutenants urged him to disperse his forces so that the Confederates could wage guerrilla warfare against the Union. Lee refused, thus preventing the newly re-United States from becoming the Balkans of North America.