The link between the war and the appeal of the Reagan revolution is harder to make, but it is not implausible that antipathy towards the federal government may be connected to the loss of a quarter of all white male southerners aged 16 to 45, who were maimed or killed in a war against it.If this is right, then there are two possible futures for what was once the Confederacy.
This symbol of racial oppression, as the NAACP sees it, should never fly over a government building.The flag went up, 37 years ago, to celebrate the centenary of the Confederacy.
In the American civil war, the south embargoed cotton supplies in the hope of putting pressure on Britain to recognise the Confederacy.
But even though the struggle to preserve segregation was lost by the 1970s, Montgomery didn't put the slogan "Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement" on its seal until 2002; and while by that point the issue may have become nonpolitical enough for the city to embrace the struggle for racial equality, it hadn't become nonpolitical enough for the city to drop the old homage to the Confederacy.
Mr Perry's notorious allusion to secession, for example, was taken by Texans to refer to the Republic of Texas, and it took me a while to realise that national listeners heard that as a sentimental reference to the Confederacy.
The North let slip a strategic victory but denied one to the South: by turning back Lee's invasion the union dissuaded the British and French governments from granting diplomatic recognition to the confederacy.
And West Virginia seceded from Virginia in 1861, rather than join the Confederacy.
Europe is not at the point where, as the Federalist papers argue, it is about to revert to "bloody wars in which one half of the confederacy has displayed its banners against the other half".
Gay-marriage proponents see it as a riper target than the states of the Confederacy.
Leticia Van de Putte, a Texas state senator from San Antonio with relatives on both sides of the border, points out that "our family was there when it was Spain, when it was France, when it was Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, the Confederacy.
Similarly, Mississippi's companions at the low end of the per-capita income table are West Virginia and Idaho, neither of which fought for the Confederacy.
