On Tuesday, Ashcroft could not be reached for comment over the 2-year-old interview, but when it first surfaced in the fall of 1999, after Ashcroft had blocked the appointment of African-American Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ronnie White from the federal bench, his Senate office tersely stood by his comments.

Bush spokeswoman Mindy Tucker dismissed the potential damage of the Partisan interview on Ashcroft's chances for confirmation. "Sen. Ashcroft is a man who wants an exact reading of history," she said of his praise of Confederate leaders. "I think it matters what the man believes," she added. "If you look at the facts, he has a wonderful record on civil rights."

Most groups aligned against the Ashcroft nomination would disagree. Hilary Shelton, Washington director of the NAACP, says the interview reflects Ashcroft's abysmal record with blacks, pointing out that 90 percent of blacks in Missouri voted Nov. 7 for the late Mel Carnahan for senator instead of Ashcroft, who lost. Carnahan's widow, Jean, assumed office in his place.

"Ninety percent of African-Americans in Missouri would rather vote for a dead man than for Ashcroft," Shelton says. The nonprofit People for the American Way, which led the attack on McCain's hiring of Quinn last year, plans to focus specifically on the Partisan interview when it raises concerns about Ashcroft's record during the confirmation process.

All because of a brief talk to an obscure quarterly journal published in South Carolina but operating in the mental CSA (Confederate States of America), written for and by those who feel that the wrong side won the Civil War. Its Dixiecrat ideology -- in columns, interviews, book reviews, editorial cartoons and essays -- is leavened with pieces about more innocuous aspects of Southern culture: recipes, NASCAR racing, country music and Civil War history. There's a strong rightward lean to the politics, with a suspicion of central government, international entanglements and taxes. On social issues, it's hard-line family values. The advertisers are more extreme and disturbing.

Editor in chief Christopher Sullivan says the magazine has little to do with race, but then again, he also says the Confederacy had little to do with race. Slavery was an unfortunate occurrence, he says, but somewhat inevitable, and its offenses overstated. Regardless, he believes slavery should not dim the honor of Confederate heroes.

"There's a movement out there to erase these people from history just because people disagree with them," Sullivan asserts. "We just want them to be treated fairly."

Sullivan says that he, along with several Southern Partisan contributors and "most credible historians," doesn't believe that slavery was the root cause of the Civil War. A recent cover story by Sullivan was headlined: "Did Slavery Cause the War Between the States?" The answer: a resounding no.

So then what, exactly, did cause the war? "Southerners just hate to be told what to do," Sullivan says. Slavery, he says, was incidental to the larger issue of states' rights, a cause Sullivan says motivated most Confederate soldiers. This split, according to Sullivan, was inevitable, regardless of the disposition of slavery.

"It's historically wrong to portray the war as a battle between bad Southern slave owners and good abolitionists," Sullivan says. Perhaps, though surely most schoolchildren learn the generically balanced view well represented by this blurb from the Encyclopedia Brittanica: "The ensuing outbreak of armed hostilities was the culmination of decades of growing sectional friction over the related issues of slavery, trade and tariffs, and the doctrine of states' rights."

Curiously, though, Sullivan does participate in an odd game of slave-baiting. Lee, he points out, freed his slaves before Union military commander Ulysses S. Grant did.