Story highlights Pro-Confederate activists held events at Moore's foundation in 2009 and 2010.

The events promoted a history of the Civil War sympathetic to the Confederate cause.

(CNN) Pro-Confederate activists twice held events to commemorate Alabama's 1861 secession from the United States at the headquarters of the foundation led at the time by Roy Moore, the new Republican nominee for US Senate.

The events, held at the Foundation for Moral Law's building in 2009 and 2010, promoted a history of the Civil War sympathetic to the Confederate cause, in which the conflict is presented as one fought over the federal government violating the South's sovereignty as opposed to one fought chiefly over the preservation of slavery.

Speakers at the events included Franklin Sanders, who is a board member of the League of the South, an organization that advocates for a "free and independent Southern republic," and Rev. Chuck Baldwin, who has written that he believes "the South was right in the War Between the States" and that Confederate leaders were not racist. Most academic scholars identify slavery as a central cause of the war.

At the time of the events, Moore, who on Tuesday won a runoff race to become the Republican nominee for US Senate, was the president of the Foundation for Moral Law, a Christian legal nonprofit he founded in the early 2000s. Moore stepped down as president in 2013 when he was elected to the Alabama Supreme Court, but still retains the title president emeritus. His wife, Kayla Moore, currently serves as the organization's president.

Moore's association with the "Secession Day" event first came under scrutiny during his failed 2010 campaign to be Alabama's governor. At the time, the Associated Press reported on the 2010 event taking place at Moore's foundation. The executive director for the foundation, Rich Hobson, now Moore's campaign manager, told the AP that he was the one who approved the event and that Moore didn't know about it.

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