Historian Ken Burns reminded supporters of the Confederacy on Sunday that the Civil War had been primarily about slavery, and not states' rights as many conservatives have claimed.
"You know, when the Constitutional Convention happened, there was a man named John J. Chapman, who said slavery was like a sleeping serpent," Burns told CBS host John Dickerson. "It lay coiled under the table during the deliberations; thereafter, slavery was on everyone's mind, if not always on his tongue."
"You know, we've grown up as country with a lot of powerful symbols of the Civil War in popular culture that would be 'Birth of a Nation,' D.W. Griffiths' classic, and 'Gone with the Wind,' of course," he explained. "And in that, it postulates, among other things, both films, that the Ku Klux Klan, which is a homegrown terrorist organization, was actually a heroic force in the story of the Civil War. So it's no wonder that Americans have permitted themselves to be sold a bill of goods about what happened, oh, it's about states' rights, it's about nullification, it's about differences between cultural and political and economic forces that shaped the North and the South."
But Burns recommended that Americans read South Carolina's Articles of Secession to get the real story on why the states went to war against each other.
"[T]hey do not mention states' rights. They mention slavery, slavery, slavery," he pointed out. "And that we have to remember. It is much more complicated than that, but essentially the reason why we murdered each other -- more than 2 percent of our population, 750,000 Americans died; that's more than all the wars from the Revolution through Afghanistan combined -- was over essentially the issue of slavery."
According to Burns, the racism running through the DNA of America was still present in modern day politics.
"The main American theme, I think, is freedom," he noted. "But we also notice that race is always there. Always there. When Thomas Jefferson says all men are created equal, he owns a couple hundred human beings and he doesn't see the contradiction or the hypocrisy and doesn't free anybody in his lifetime and sets in motion an American narrative that is bedeviled by a question of race."
"And we struggle with it. We try to ignore it. We pretend, with the election of Barack Obama, that we're in some post-racial society," he continued. "And what we have seen is a kind of reaction to this. The birther movement, of which Donald Trump is one of the authors of, is another politer way of saying the N word. It's just more sophisticated and a little bit more clever. He's 'other,' he's different."
"What's actually 'other' and different about him? It turns out it's the same old thing. It's the color of his skin."
