by Alvin S. Felzenberg

About the author: Alvin S. Felzenberg held senior-level positions in George H.W. Bush’s administration and served as New Jersey’s assistant secretary of state. He is also the editor of The Keys to a Successful Presidency.

In 1984, in Biloxi, Mississippi, deep in the heart of the old Confederacy, the future Senate majority leader Trent Lott declared that “the spirit of Jefferson Davis” now lives in the Republican party.

It’s a mystery quite how the party of Abraham Lincoln, born in the moral outrage of the great northern abolitionists, could become in the minds of some of its most visible modern leaders the party of Davis. To some, Davis’s legacy may seem one of support for states’ rights. To others...