Phil Leigh likes to use the term "Righteous Cause Mythology" as a counter to Lost Cause Mythology.
https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/righteous-cause-mythology/
Since the cause declarations of some of the seven Cotton States in the first secession wave cite the protection of slavery as a prime reason for leaving the Union, Righteous Cause historians conclude slavery was the only cause of the Civil War. The paragon example is Battle Cry of Freedom author James McPherson who said, “Probably…95 percent of serious historians of the Civil War would agree on…what the war was about . . . which was the increasing polarization of the country between the free states and the slave states over issues of slavery….” McPherson and his acolytes dismiss all other issues even when such factors are evident by comparing the US and Confederate constitutions. For example, the Southern central government was prohibited from (1) imposing protective tariffs, (2) spending taxpayer money on public works, and (3) subsidizing private industries. Although Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas joined the Confederacy and doubled its White population only after the Federal government required they provide soldiers to invade the Cotton States, Righteous Cause historians insist that the four upper-south states also fought only for slavery.
The Righteous Cause also dismisses the fact that two-thirds of Southern families did not own slaves. Acolytes spill oceans of ink arguing that non-slaveholding Southerners willingly left their homes and risked their lives chiefly – if not exclusively – to promote the “slavocracy.” Although tens-of-thousands of Union volunteers rose up spontaneously to defend their homes in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania when Rebel armies approached those states, Righteous Cause historians don’t credit Southerners with the same instinct, evidently because of endemic Yankee moral superiority. Of course it’s illogical and a lie. As the venerable William C. Davis writes:
The widespread northern myth that the Confederates went to the battlefield to perpetuate slavery is just that, a myth. Their letters and diaries, in the tens-of-thousands, reveal again and again, that they fought and died because their Southern homeland was invaded and their natural instinct was to protect their home and hearth.
Righteous Cause Mythology falsely equates the reasons for secession with the reasons Southerners chose to fight. But they are not the same. Southerners fought to defend their homes. The more pertinent question is to ask why Northerners fought. After all, the Northern states could have let the Southern states leave in peace, without any War at all. It was precisely what prominent abolitionists frequently advocated prior to the War. Examples include William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Beecher, Samuel Howe, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Clark, Gerrit Smith, Joshua Giddings, and even Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner who would become a leading war hawk. For years Garrison described the constitutional Union as “a covenant with death and agreement with hell.”
The Righteous Cause Myth is a natural consequence of the false insistence that the South fought for nothing but slavery. Thus, if the South waged war only to preserve slavery, then it logically follows the Yankees waged war for the sole purpose of freeing the slaves. It is a morally comfortable viewpoint for historians who came of age during and after the twentieth century civil rights movement. But it’s as phony and useless as a football bat.
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