Among the many oddities to be found in Donald Trump’s response to the violent neo-Confederate protests in Charlottesville in August was his complaint that protesters who wished to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee at the University of Virginia would not stop until they’d removed statues of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, too. It’s often difficult to divine Trump’s thinking in the best of circumstances, but the through-line here seemed to be that these figures were all guilty of enslaving black people. In a more normal time, it would have been jarring to observe a politician born and raised in New York City place Robert E. Lee, a Virginian who attempted to overthrow the United States government, in the same category as Washington and Jefferson, who’d built that government in the first place.

We witnessed the second installment of Yankee Sympathizing with the Lost Cause earlier this week, when Trump’s Boston-born chief of staff, John Kelly, stated in an interview with Laura Ingraham that Lee was an “honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state.” He went on to argue that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.” It would be tempting to see this as the Trump Administration inching closer to Orwellian Ministry of Truth fabrications about the past, but this mythology predates Trump’s arrival in the White House and remains widespread a century and a half after the end of the war.

Kelly’s interpretation of history is striking for a number of reasons. One is his tolerance for the idea that someone’s state loyalties could reasonably supersede national ones, though he works in an Administration that is obsessed with the possibility of Muslim citizens placing their religious loyalties above their American ones. Another is its antagonistic relationship with the facts of history. The argument that Lee was moved to take up arms in defense of slavery according to the abstract principle of “states’ rights” is belied by Virginia’s 1861 Ordinance of Secession, which clearly states that its grievance lies with “the Federal Government having perverted [its] powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slaveholding states.”

Kelly’s argument that the war in which Lee fought was caused by an inability to compromise is even more tortured. The history of the Republic to 1860 is literally a history of compromises designed to reconcile varying positions on slavery. A short list of those agreements would include the removal of the anti­­-slave-trade passage in the Declaration of Independence; the three-fifths, slave-trade, fugitive-slave, and Electoral College clauses of the Constitution; the Northwest Ordinance, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and, on the verge of the war, the proposed Crittenden Compromise, which would have prohibited federal abolition of slavery in the South. By 1858, when Abraham Lincoln delivered his “House Divided” speech, it had become clear that more compromise could no longer stave off a national reckoning with slavery. “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall,” he wrote. “But I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

The more profound issue—one that Kelly’s view of the war completely overlooks—is not how compromise could have prevented war. It’s that those compromises were part of the reason that black people, who made up more than forty per cent of the Southern population in 1860, had existed in slavery or indenture for two hundred and forty-one years in North America. Contemporary observers tend to think of the Confederate cause as hypocritical for its indignant references to “liberty” and “freedom” while it held four million black people as slaves. But the key point is that white Southerners, by and large, understood slavery to be a function of their liberty. They considered themselves heirs to the revolution led by Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson—a revolution that had as its goal the creation of a white-supremacist republic. By 1857, they could support their claim by pointing to the Dred Scott decision, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney held that the Founders never intended to include blacks as citizens of their republic.

These arguments—prominently, unabashedly presented at the time—are nearly absent from current popular discussion of the South. It is this absence that allows space for people to believe that the men who fought for the Confederacy were “honorable” and warrant the monuments and memorials dedicated to them, both in and beyond the South.

The idea Kelly articulated—that the Civil War resulted from the blunders of politicians who failed to act imaginatively enough to avert it—has appeal for obvious reasons. It erases the moral culpability of slaveholders. It excuses contemporary white Americans from feelings of guilt that this nation was nearly torn in half because of a debate over whether black people are human beings. As the historian W. E. B. Du Bois observed eighty years ago, the end of the war presented both the North and the South with reasons to avoid a truthful retelling of the war’s origins. Northerners, he argued, disdained the fact that saving their Union required the assistance of nearly two hundred thousand black soldiers, and demurred on the subject of the war altogether. Southerners, aware that history would judge them for fighting to their last for the right to buy, sell, rape, breed, and exploit human beings, retreated into a fantasy that the war was due to the vagaries of federalism.

As the social-media reaction to Kelly’s statement attests, it is strikingly common even today to hear it argued that the war was about “states’ rights,” not slavery. That argument falls apart when you consider that Southerners supported legislation, like the Fugitive Slave Act, that actually reduced states’ rights, as long as they further empowered slaveholders. Were states’ rights the primary cause of the conflict, the states should have exploded into open warfare following the Supreme Court’s McCulloch v. Maryland decision, which drastically diminished state powers of taxation while increasing those of the federal government. But no war broke out. In South Carolina, an overheated tariff debate led to threats of secession in 1831, but no such fracture occurred. Only slavery, the pivotal conflict, the issue that previous generations had attempted to kick down the road indefinitely, brought together the economic, moral, and political elements necessary for a conflagration.

It is not entirely implausible to see this strand of absolutionism appear again from the Trump Administration. Trump’s self-declared goal of making America great again is also a marketing campaign to make white people feel good again, even if doing so requires parting company with annoyances like facts, data, evidence, and, currently, the historical record. This is not a novel phenomenon, but the current decibel of this racialist noise is noteworthy. The more fundamental point, the one that Trump unwittingly articulated two months ago and Kelly confirmed on Monday night, is that, while April, 1865, marked the end of the war, the end of the hostilities is another matter entirely.