My Essay on Slavery and The Civil War

My essay "The Civil War's Dirty Secret: It Was Always About Slavery," ran on April 10, and has been stirring controversy ever since, with more than 100,000 readers and nearly 200 comments. One would not think its central thesis debatable, but apparently it still is.

Much of the research that went into the article was done for my book, due out in July, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South. 

This photograph is of a slave known as Gordon who escaped from a Louisiana plantation in 1863, made it to the Union lines near Baton Rouge, and joined the Union Army. His story—with an engraving made from this photograph—was published in Harper's Weekly on July 4, 1863.