Kelly's white-nationalist  view of the Civil War is not "just history." Kelly's ignorant, if not racist, view of history ignores the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln's proposal to limit slavery's growth but not eliminate it, and Lincoln's proposal to "compromise" by paying reparations to slave owners rather than to former slaves.

As Adam Serwer wrote in the Atlantic Monthly:
"even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a 'foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.'"