To modern day Confederate wannabes, the Civil War was an exercise in Yankee imperialism. Southerners were just trying to protect their land and their culture—built on agriculture, free trade, and ideas of honor–from the brutal, aggressive materialism of the North. Slavery had nothing to do with it.
To the authors of the 1619 Project, the Civil War is just the brief interval between the horrors of slavery and the betrayal of Reconstruction. It was a random natural disaster, like a tornado, that shouldn’t interfere with the narrative that all white Americans are evil racist oppressors. Slavery had nothing to do with it.
And so, the two great ideological opponents agree on something! The inconvenient truth is that they are both wrong. The war was indeed about slavery, to the everlasting shame of the Confederates. And the blood sacrifices of the people of the North were viewed as the price of redemption for the nation’s original sin, thus making the concept of reparations superfluous, at least to those of us who are not descended from plantation owners.