Correspondents in South Carolina tell me their media was monopolized by last week's burial of the crew of the Hunley. It is the submarine that destroyed a Union ship on Feb. 17, 1864. As is the nature of broadcast media, pictures of the pomp and color of the lengthy ceremonies were the overwhelming messages communicated. South Carolina print media also largely represented the Hunley in a superficial way the neo-Confederate movement, which is behind the deification of the submarine and its crew, adores. But, there were cracks in the 'Hail the Old South!' armor. John Monk of The State wrote a column that looks beyond the single fact of the Hunley being the first sub to sink a ship.

This week’s six-day funeral of the crew of the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley will be a celebration of a thin slice of history — a brief, trailblazing underwater mission that resulted in the sinking of a Union ship.

But the pageantry surrounding the Hunley also will be a denial of other histories, a sanitizing of one of the most controversial American eras, some historians say.

Nowhere will it be mentioned that if the eight-man Hunley crew had been on the victorious side of the Civil War, 4 million black people would have continued to be slaves, the historians point out.

Nowhere will it be mentioned that, at the time of the Hunley’s mission, South Carolina’s 291,000 whites were forcing 400,000 black slaves to work without pay and with scant hope of freedom.

“The war was fought to perpetuate slavery,” said William Hine, history professor at South Carolina State University. He was one of about 75 S.C. professors who signed a public statement in 2000 saying the historical record “clearly shows” that the South’s wanting to preserve slavery was the fundamental cause of the Civil War.

“The whole Southern way of life was wrapped around slavery, and even though many white Southerners did not own slaves, it was still essential for their way of life,” Hine said. “People fought for that way of life even though they were not slave owners.”