Re “Hanover County NAACP files federal lawsuit over schools’ Confederate names,” Free Press Aug. 22-24 edition:

The Hanover County Branch NAACP’s federal lawsuit over Hanover schools with Confederate names is on specious grounds. The North was not waging war for the slaves, but against the South’s secession — just as King George III waged war against the 13 slave-holding colonies for their secession (declaration of independence from the British Empire.)

Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s royal governor, even issued an emancipation proclamation as a war measure, just like President Lincoln did.

As for slavery, the entire United States was complicit — except the Quakers. Slavery was not legal everywhere, and there were many where it was legal who were against it, but the wealth produced by slavery was the cornerstone of the wealth of the entire Union, most of which gravitated into the North’s “mercantile kingdom.”

There were many causes for secession, including slavery in the territories, but there was only one cause for the war, which was secession itself. The Confederate soldier was fighting not for slavery, but to defend his homeland from invasion, conquest and coerced political allegiance. The North admitted as much just before Fort Sumter in an article published in the Richmond Whig on April 9, 1861:

“Slavery has nothing whatever to do with the tremendous issues now awaiting decision. It has disappeared almost entirely from the political discussions of the day. No one mentions it in connection with our present complications. The question which we have to meet is precisely what it would be if there were not a [N]egro slave on American soil ...”

And what was that “question” that had to be met? The Constitution? Hardly. The North usurped it with impunity with its sectional majorities and its lust for control of the federal government. The question that had to be met was control of “the cotton kingdom.” Cotton was king, and with the Cotton Kingdom out of the Union and out from under the control of the Northern sectional majorities, the North’s “mercantile kingdom” would collapse. So President Lincoln sent an armada to Charleston Harbor to provoke South Carolina into firing the first shot to get the war he wanted.

And the rest is history, although it has been twisted out of shape to conform to the toxic identity politics of our multicultural empire.

I have some disturbing news for the Hanover NAACP: You may tear down every Confederate monument on the face of the earth and rename every school on the planet. But it won’t change a thing, except for getting demagogues elected. It is better to know the truth, which the Scriptures tell us will set us free.

H.V. “BO” TRAYWICK JR.

Richmond