" Granted, to approach this history with the binary framework provided by the Civil War can make for a simplistic morality play. One in which it's all too easy and too obvious for a Yankee to traipse into a Southern cemetery and clutch his Northern pearls. Robert Penn Warren called this instinct the "treasury of virtue" - the white Northern's feeling that, by dint of our affiliation with the Union, the great, emancipating army, well, then we were (and remained) morally upstanding, unimpeachably good. It was a feeling that could render us "happy in forgetfulness," the Civil War like an event horizon beyond which our own pasts vanish "

― , Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy