"Virginia's Richmond City Council voted in favor of a mural of Robert E. Lee displayed in the Canal Walk along the James River. .
In 1998, Virginia's governor proclaimed April as "Confederate History Month, as well as the Confederate battle flag floating over the South Carolina state capital. In Maryland, vanity license plates bearing small Confederate flags caused problems for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, while University of Mississippi students had a tradition of waving the Confederate flag at sporting events. A "Neo-Confederate" movement, including the League of the South, has boasted the Pro-Dixie sentiment with web sites, bumper stickers, and t-shirts (10). With conflicting notions of honor and differing ideologies, it's no wonder that the main cause of secession remains a mystery on whether it was for state's rights or slavery.
In Jefferson Davis's first inaugural address, as president of the Confederate States of America, the sole reasons for secession was resistance to Northern tyranny and the defense of state's rights. However, state secession conventions had a different theme to their reasons for leaving the Union. Conventions in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas all dealt with the slave issue. Even vice president Alexander Stephens in his March, 21 speech had a similar theme to the state conventions. He proclaimed that the founding fathers were wrong in the assumption that all races were equal. The very foundation of the new government would rest upon the truth that Negros weren't equal to the white man (14). On April, 29 1861 Jefferson Davis changed his tune and echoed the VP when he claimed that slavery was an institution in which a superior race had transformed brutal savages into civilized agricultural laborers (15).
Still, by the end of the Civil War, there was no clear evidence that secession was caused by slavery, as Davis, Stephens, and others insisted that it was all about sectional hostility and preserving equality among the states; a claim that still persists today with Neo-Confederates.
