The Civil War isn't over yet. There was a flap over an old rock 'n' roller, Ted Nugent, wearing a Confederate flag shirt at Gov. Rick Perry's inaugural ball last month. And in a Jan. 29 column in this newspaper, Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson argued that for Southerners, slavery wasn't the central issue of the war.

Patterson, like other defenders of Confederate heritage, acknowledges the evil of slavery but insists that the war was about the limits of federal power and asserting state's rights, including the right to secede from the union. The North argued otherwise, and the Civil War settled that issue: They can't.

But defenders of the Confederate States like Patterson confuse justification with motive. Texans didn't secede to defend their right to secede. They seceded to protect their way of life, and slavery was central to that way of life. They said so, in so many words.

On Feb. 1, 1861 — long, long before February became Black History Month — a special secession convention meeting in Austin voted 166-8 to adopt an "Ordinance for Secession," subject to voter approval. (Of course, at that time voters meant white men only.) On Feb. 2, the same convention adopted a "Declaration of Causes" to explain its support for secession.

The Feb. 2 declaration opens with a brief review of how Texas came to be a state in 1845, but wastes no time getting to its primary grievance with the Northern states — slavery.

It says the United States admitted Texas "as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro (sic) slavery — the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits — a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time."

The next paragraph complains that the Northern states have plotted to exclude slavery from new states to be carved from the still-wild West "for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common (federal) government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slave-holding States."

There's more.

The declaration charges that Northerners have organized "a great sectional party" — the still-new Republican Party — that is "now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those (Northern) States, based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color — a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law."

Got that? Texas explicitly rejected the "debasing doctrine" that all men are created equal.

The declaration continues:

"They demand the abolition of negro (sic) slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and the negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States."

And so there can be absolutely no doubt as to what the Texans had in mind, the declaration says:

"We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable."

So Patterson may not think secession was about slavery, but it sure was for the white Texans who wanted to secede.

On Feb. 23, 1861, Texas voters approved the ordinance of secession by an overwhelming margin, 44,317 to 13,020. Historians have noted that support for secession was strongest in areas where there was the most slavery. Slaves represented about one-third of Texas' population.

Patterson is quite right when he reminds us that slavery "is a dark chapter in our history, North and South alike." But here's a fact: It was the North that ended it and the South, flying the flag of the Confederacy, that fought to save it.

Patterson quoted Lincoln. I will too, from his second inaugural address, in 1864, in which he said that everyone, North and South, knew that slavery "was somehow the cause of the war."

About 94,000 Confederate soldiers died in Civil War combat, plus about 164,000 from other causes, such as disease. The U.S. Army lost about 110,000 in combat, plus 250,000 dead from other causes.

Yes, the Southern soldiers fought hard, heroically in defense of their way of life. The tragedy is that the institution at the heart of that way of life, slavery, was evil. They didn't just fight on the losing side. They fought on the wrong side. Their sacrifice was a waste.