# How is the Civil War taught in the south? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 10, 2016, 11:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752 "2016-01-10T23:25:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2016, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752/81 "2016-01-13T15:00:30Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > Folks who downplay the role of the Holocaust in World War II Not to be one of those revisionists, but the Holocaust didn’t really have much at all to do with the war itself. It’s something that happened concurrently with, and that was affected significantly by the war, but in more of a one-sided way, with the war affecting the Holocaust, and not so much the other way around. That’s not at all to downplay the Holocaust at all, but rather to put it in the proper perspective- the Western Allies didn’t do a thing about it, and neither did the Soviets. And by the time the mass-murder had ramped up to the highest levels(1943-1944), the Allied and Soviet troops were already on the offensive in Europe anyway. That’s the sort of nuance that I think is acceptable. It’s not downplaying anything at all, and just putting things in their place. And about Civil War memorials and statues… I don’t have a real problem with ones put up in the immediate aftermath of the war; it’s a bit unrealistic to expect people not to memorialize the combatants, victors or vanquished, of a war that \*\*\*killed \*\*\*something like 20% of fighting-aged men in the South, and somewhat less in the North. And I don’t have a real problem with battlefield memorials from any state or locality commemorating their troops. For example, the sort of town square monument listing all the local soldiers killed in service don’t bother me- they’re not glorifying the conflict or anything, but rather commemorating community members killed in service. Would we feel any different about a similar monument commemorating Iraq War dead? I do think it’s pretty damned odious though that the governments in many Southern states put up a lot of romantic-type statuary and “Lost Cause” garbage statues in the early part of the 20th century- that seems to me to have been a big middle finger to the North and the Federal Government, and they picked an obnoxious way to do that. ---
**Author:** ![Charlie\_Wayne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4bbf92/32.png) [@Charlie\_Wayne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Charlie_Wayne)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2016, 3:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752/82 "2016-01-13T15:11:42Z")
NM. Sorry. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2016, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752/83 "2016-01-13T15:13:22Z")
> [@Charlie\_Wayne](#): > > I once shared dinner with a diplomat from the Israeli embassy. > > The conversation eventually got around to WW2 and The Holocaust. > > He looked at me with a look that can best be described as “chilling” and told me the following: > > I can absolutely guarantee you that will never ever happen again. > > Would any of you care to guess just how he could have been so certain? Also, what do you think he was referring to? > > Just my opinion, but I got the feeling he was referring to Israel’s nuclear arsenal and he meant to say that before Israel would ever again allow any nation to engage in the wholesale slaughter of the Jews, they would use their nukes to stop it. > > Chilling? Oh my yes! He’s mainly saying that he many others will fight back this time. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2016, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752/84 "2016-01-13T15:42:15Z")
I went to school in a middle-class suburb of Atlanta many years ago. I feel like overall there was a detailed and balanced treatment of the causes and events leading up to the Civil War, its highlights, aftermath, and reconstruction. Years later, here are some areas where I now feel it was somewhat unbalanced:[ul] [li]Slavery was discussed as a cause, but emphasized as a legal dispute over states’ rights. I am a bit shocked as an adult to learn how blatant white supremacy was woven into the Confederacy.[/li][li]There was some exposition about the Conferate leadership being not such bad guys, just sort of being backed into a corner.[/li][li]There was emphasis on Lincoln’s supposed hypocrisy in not really caring about slavery but preserving the Union (i.e. the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free slaves in the northern states).[/li][li]I remember very little being said about pro-Union dissent within the Confederacy, or its brutal treatment of its own citizens and soldiers. [/li][/ul] Being in a cultural milieu that was majority Confederate-sympathetic, I feel like this faux “fair and balanced” approach was incredibly irresponsible and a disservice to us students. ---
**Author:** ![Edward\_The\_Head](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ce73a5/32.png) [@Edward\_The\_Head](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Edward_The_Head)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2016, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752/85 "2016-01-13T15:56:58Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > Maryland is “regionally” in the [mid-Atlantic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_states), not “the South”. If you mean that I’m finicky about facts, well yeah, I’ll cop to that. > [@usedtobe](#): > > Since the Civil War Between the States concerned only “North” and “South” (NO “Mid-Atlantic”), MD was South. > It was even south of the fabled Mason-Dixon Line. > > I’ll leave it to others to decide if the culture was North or South. > The fact that it (and KY, too) was a slave-holding state would indicate it is properly grouped with the South. Maryland is considered more culturally southern then northern. Even the [Maryland State Archives](http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/speccol/sc5500/sc5572/000001/000000/000017/html/t17.html) says as much. [QUOTE=Maryland State Archives] In early 1861, Maryland was walking a tightrope between the Union and the Confederacy. In addition to being physically between the two sides, Maryland depended equally on the North and the South for its economy. Although Maryland had always leaned toward the south culturally, sympathies in the state were as much pro-Union as they were pro-Confederate. Reflecting that division and the feeling of many Marylanders that they just wanted to be left alone, the state government would not declare for either side. [/quote] Or rather leans culturally southern. There were enough people who went to Virginia to fight for the Confederates. Hell, there were state legislators that were arrested for voting to [secede](http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/speccol/sc5500/sc5572/000001/000000/000017/html/t17.html). As for how I was taught in Maryland, we had two US history classes, one that went revolutionary time period through the Civil War, and the next year after the Civil War. I remember being taught that it was a states right reason to secede and little on slavery being the cause. We always did get to the Civil War right at the end of the school year so we didn’t talk that much about it. ---
**Author:** ![Charlie\_Wayne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4bbf92/32.png) [@Charlie\_Wayne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Charlie_Wayne)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2016, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752/86 "2016-01-13T16:28:15Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > He’s mainly saying that he many others will fight back this time. I should explain that I made a post here and then thought it might be considered a thread hijack. So I deleted the text and replaced it with “NM. Sorry” Then I started a new thread in IMHO. I am posting this to try and clear up any confusion that I may have caused in this thread. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2016, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752/87 "2016-01-13T18:24:32Z")
> [@Penfeather](#): > > There are probably two touchstones for modern evil, the Nazi Holocaust, and slavery in the American South. And the reason is that the perpetrators of both weren’t the people of a far off time or a distant lands: they were like us, or like a lot of us reading this. They were the products of Christian and European society, they were the heirs to a couple of thousand of years of Western culture and religion and philosophy and thought and progress, they were the products of the Renaissance, the reformation, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. and the Industrial Revolution. The plantation owners were us, they had our standards and our values, or damn near them. And they knew as well as we do that what they was doing was wrong, that you don’t own human beings like farm animals and they did it anyway, and they came up with reasons to justify it, and they were willing to fight and kill for their right to continue using other people as cattle. That was their real evil, that they did such great wrong knowing that is was wrong. and that’s why they are still so despised. I’ll add that a common feature of rhetoric by both groups (American Southerners of the 1800s and German Nazis) was deeply-felt, frequently-expressed desire for _their own_ personal freedom at any price. “The South will never yield to this tyranny/Germany must be free to manage her own destiny” sort of stuff. While, of course, enslaving and killing others. > [@Shagnasty](#): > > However, I do not like the South to become a scapegoat for something that was once a widespread institution facilitated even by those that would eventually go to war for it. What you’re missing, I think, or what others have not emphasized in a way that you internalize, is that all those other regions (the Northern States, Europe, South America, the Caribbean) that had slavery eventually _gave up_ slavery, either willingly or at least without a fight.\* The bitterness with which (some) Southerners clung to slavery, the extremes of their self-justification, their willingness to kill and die for (or, more accurately, exhort someone else’s sons to kill and die for) the maintenance of the institution, and the importance they attached to their self-identification as “better than” slaves all come across to outsiders as both evil and hypocritical. \*To avoid unnecessary complexity, I am not going to address Haiti’s rebellion here, nor the Border States, which essentially were Southern in sympathy, trying to maintain slavery without paying the price of war. My own experiences in school in Virginia were mixed – some regional apologism, mixed with attempts to understand the horrors of slavery. Mostly I remember a very lengthy and detailed unit on Reconstruction, filled with slavery apologies and an inexplicable hatred of how sharecropping and carpetbaggers had been bad for the poverty-stricken former slaves. Inexplicable in that said hatred was most vociferously expressed by corporation-loving, unfettered free-market capitalists who hated modern minimum-wage laws. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2016, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752/88 "2016-01-13T19:16:44Z")
> [@Penfeather](#): > > There are probably two touchstones for modern evil, the Nazi Holocaust, and slavery in the American South. And the reason is that the perpetrators of both weren’t the people of a far off time or a distant lands: they were like us, or like a lot of us reading this. They were the products of Christian and European society, they were the heirs to a couple of thousand of years of Western culture and religion and philosophy and thought and progress, they were the products of the Renaissance, the reformation, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. . Not Stalin? Not Pol Pot? Not the Armenian “genocide”? Do note that Pagans and Muslims were the primary slave takers, and slavery ended in the Ottman Empire in 1882(not really, but was made technically illegal, Brazil later, and in a few African nations- continued legally into the 20th century. So, not Christian and European any more than African/Asian Muslim/Pagan. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2016, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752/89 "2016-01-13T19:19:34Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > The nuance that most people miss is that the Civil War was only mainly about slavery on one side - the Southern side. Many states listed it in their declarations of war. However, that does not mean that the North was fighting directly to end slavery either. One strong piece of evidence is that some northern states also had slavery even during the Civil War. However, the strongest was that Abraham Lincoln stated so directly himself… > > _“I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.”_ > > [Abraham Lincoln's Letter to Horace Greeley](http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm) > > I am obviously not in favor of slavery nor is even the most vile racist that I have ever met. However, I do not like the South to become a scapegoat for something that was once a widespread institution facilitated even by those that would eventually go to war for it. The United States, including the North had slavery for almost 200 years before it became a widespread point of divisiveness. I don’t believe it is right to ask the South to take responsibility for all of it because it didn’t have a good way to support its agrarian economy for another 50 years after other regions built up different economies. Yes, but the CSA and Lincoln knew full well that\* saving the Union\* meant the eventual end of slavery. That’s why the CSA left the Union. They knew Abe and Congress would start on the process. So the South deserves it’s vilification. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2016, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752/90 "2016-01-13T19:24:44Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > 1. They were willing to fight for it because their agrarian economy would collapse if they just waved their hands and declared all of the slaves free at the same time. For example, Mississippi had 430,000 mostly illiterate slaves with no resources of their own at the commencement of the Civil War and that was by far the majority of the population with relatively few owners. That is a massive economic and social problem that would be hard to solve even today. Sure, plantation owners got themselves into that mess but was not an easy system to dissolve without complete chaos including mass starvation. > > 2. The vast majority of Confederate soldiers didn’t even have any slaves in their family. They weren’t even fighting for the Confederacy in general. Things were a lot more localized then. They were fighting for their homes, their family or their state. Most of them were barely literate and got drafted into a cause that they didn’t understand well and were fighting for the survival of their family or their town. > > . Oddly the Agrarian society didnt collapse. True, it took a hit, but it was doomed anyway. In any case the South was completely against all compromise on the issue. If they had agreed that all newborns were born free and that trading would end after a decade, then it would have been accepted. But they left the Union rather than see any possible change to their peculiar institution. If the CSA was fighting to defend their home, why did they attack the North to start? :dubious: ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2016, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752/91 "2016-01-13T19:26:40Z")
> [@bump](#): > > This all eventually came to a head in the Civil War, when the South seceded, because they felt like they were ceasing to control their own affairs, and that the North was starting to dictate what they’d do, and to a great extent, threatening to deprive them of their wealth and property (slaves) without due process or compensation. The threat of Federal legislation to change what they saw as their way of life and source of wealth was real- the limitation of slavery in the territories was a major plank of the 1860 Republican platform, and this was seen as a stepping stone to limiting it in the South proper. . No Party was “threatening to deprive them of their wealth and property (slaves) without due process or compensation.”. Everyone talked of a slow & due process. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2016, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752/92 "2016-01-14T13:54:40Z")
I graduated high school in 1966. We lived in an unincorporated area but the school district that had claimed us belong to a “Sundown” city–although I didn’t realize it at the time. The Houston ISD had segregated schools; the Pasadena ISD didn’t because there were _no_ black kids. (There are now. The Tejano minority has become the majority & there’s a biggish Asian minority.) Don’t remember details of the curriculum. I’m sure States Rights were mentioned. But I do remember a field trip to the [Treue der Union](https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qfn01) monument in Comfort, commemorating a Confederate massacre of mostly German Texas Unionists. I could go into great detail about what I’ve learned since then–as I have in so many previous threads. But I’ll stick to education. The elected & politicized Texas State Board of Education set up criteria for social studies texts; causes of the Civil War would be States Rights, Tariffs & One Other Thing. The [Texas Freedom Network](http://www.tfn.org/site/PageServer?pagename=issues_sboe_index) has covered the matter in _great_ detail. What is actually taught in the classroom depends on the district & the teacher. Interesting note: pseudohistorian David Barton, recipient of a BA in Religions Education from Oral Roberts & now head of Ted Cruz’s Super PAC was hired as an adviser to the SBOE. Who disregarded [this article on his Wallbuilders’ site](http://www.wallbuilders.com/libissuesarticles.asp?id=92); Barton begins bemoaning examples of historical “revisionism”: > [@](#): > > A third example of historical revisionism involves the claim that the 1860-1861 secession of the Southern States which caused the Civil War was not a result of the slavery issue but rather of oppressive federal economic policies. For example, a plaque in the Texas State Capitol declares: > > > [@](#): > > > > Because we desire to perpetuate, in love and honor, the heroic deeds of those who enlisted in the Confederate Army and upheld its flag through four years of war, we, the children of the South, have united together in an organization called “Children of the Confederacy,” in which our strength, enthusiasm, and love of justice can exert its influence. We therefore pledge ourselves to preserve pure ideals; to honor our veterans; to study and teach the truths of history (_one of the most important of which is that the war between the states was not a rebellion nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery), and to always act in a manner that will reflect honor upon our noble and patriotic ancestors._ (emphasis added (by DB)) > > Other sources make the same false claim, but four notable categories of Confederate records disprove these claims and indisputably show that the South’s desire to preserve slavery was indisputably the driving reason for the formation of the Confederacy… Blind pig, acorn, etc. By the way, I _do_ remember we learned about **The Civil War**. All that **War for Southern Independence** crap was for cartoonish Old Confederates with accents like Foghorn Leghorn’s. (My own ancestors were 50% Irish until after 1900 and 50% Midwestern.) ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2016, 2:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752/93 "2016-01-14T14:28:54Z")
We didn’t get much about it in Florida at the high school level. It was pretty well acknowledged that the South started it and that the dispute between North and South was about slavery, but we didn’t go into the specifics of how slaves were treated or anything like that. I do vaguely recall a “map” of the Underground Railroad and a lesson on Dred Scott. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-the-civil-war-taught-in-the-south/742752.md?page=4)