" Reflecting from the vantage of more than a century, we can see today how trapped the leaders of the South felt in 1860. That the snare was only partially genuine, and partially in their imaginations and fears, made it no less real to them at the time. They had to act on the basis of what they knew and believed, and the fact that subsequent events and detached dispassionate study reveal that some of their belief was chimerical does not signify. "

― , The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy