Michele Bachmann's website used to include a recommended reading list. As Ryan Lizza writes in his excellent piece in the New Yorker:
The third book on the list, which appeared just before the Declaration of Independence and George Washington’s Farewell Address, is a 1997 biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins.
Wilkins' view of slavery in the antebellum south is interesting, to say the least:
Slavery, as it operated in the pervasively Christian society which was the old South, was not an adversarial relationship founded upon racial animosity. In fact, it bred on the whole, not contempt, but, over time, mutual respect. This produced a mutual esteem of the sort that always results when men give themselves to a common cause. The credit for this startling reality must go to the Christian faith. . . . The unity and companionship that existed between the races in the South prior to the war was the fruit of a common faith.
Wilkins paints a picture of all those good Christian slave owners and their happy Christian slaves all living side by side in the perfect harmony that was the pre-Civil War South. What ever evil there was in the world manifested itself in those godless Northerners and their war of aggression that stirred up so much trouble in the peaceful South.
Wilkins is the leading proponent of the theory that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North. This revisionist take on the Civil War, known as the “theological war” thesis, had little resonance outside a small group of Southern historians until the mid-twentieth century, when Rushdoony and others began to popularize it in evangelical circles. In the book, Wilkins condemns “the radical abolitionists of New England” and writes that “most southerners strove to treat their slaves with respect and provide them with a sufficiency of goods for a comfortable, though—by modern standards—spare existence.”
This is where Representative Bachmann (and one wonders how many other Republicans) gets her sense of US History.
Here's the interesting thing. If you look at the origins of the Civil War, things appear a bit different than the Wilkins narrative. South Carolina, the first state to secede, felt compelled to publish the reasons for its secession. Funny thing is, it boils down to how those mean Northern states are ignoring the US Constitution by not returning all those run-away slaves.
So on the one hand, everybody in the South, white and black, slave and slave owner, was just as happy as pie in the big Christian paradise. And yet, there was such a problem with slaves risking their lives fleeing to the North (and not being promptly returned to their owners by those mean Northerners) that South Carolina felt compelled to secede from the United States of America.
I know. This should be a no-brainer (or, if you will, a Bachmann). Wilkins was either delusional or a not-so-brilliant propagandist for the White Southern Christian Cause.
In either case, Bachmann buys it. That's who would be our president.