What about the white Northerners who benefited, directly or indirectly, from slavery? Those that made money in slave markets. Those that made money in processing slave produce. Those that ate rice, wore cotton, and used tobacco. And while we’re at it, those who opposed equal rights for black people for a lifetime after the war. Should they not also have shame and guilt for their roles?
That is, the majority of all white Americans, North and South, throughout the whole of that century, and into the next.
Yes, to varying degrees (eating rice is quite different than raping a slave, or ignoring when your neighbor beats up a free black person for no reason).
To varying degrees, yes. I’ve seen very few (if any) examples of Northerners championing pre-Civil War society, tradition, and culture as overall great and positive and unfairly maligned, and no non-Southern examples of resurrecting a dead symbol to use to oppose integration and equal rights under the guise of regional pride.
Out of curiosity, do you disagree with any of my points, or are you just saying “Yes but these other guys should have felt bad too”? 'Cause human history is replete with these sorts of things – I’m only pointing out the examples that, in my experience, so many white Southerners seem to purposefully ignore or deny.
I was raised in The South and there didn’t seem to be anything abnormal about how we were taught about The Civil War, it wasn’t presented as the War of Northern Aggression or anything silly like that. We talked about why the North was able to prevail over the south because of superior industrialization vs the South and their dependence on slavery. There was in-depth articles in the text about the suffering of slaves, the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman.
Honestly when I was younger in grade school it was hard to relate to any of that stuff because I felt so far removed from it. It really struck me in middle school though when we covered the Civil Rights era of the 1960’s I remember specifically seeing a picture when schools in the south were desegregated and it showed a couple black children sitting at the lunch counter while the white children bullied them and poured food and drinks and stuff on them, humiliating them, that really struck a nerve with me and I actually cried because it seemed so much more recent and relatable to me as a young kid in school, I just didn’t have any connections to the Civil War or slavery so I read it in a much more emotionally detached mindset.
However, it’s undoubtable that 1. the war was started by the Confederacy 2. They gathered/formed/warred for the right to enslave blacks. Black enslavement really was the reason for the war.
Of course, Lincoln’s response to the hostilities was due to his desire to hold the Union, but the war was over the right to keep/expand black enslavement. This was the main reason to outright ban the barbaric practice. If you ban it, there will be no more wars fought for its preservation.
You can blah, blah, blah about whatever. The OP was “How is the Civil War taught in the South?”
And that was exactly what I answered. I must have missed where you were sitting behind me in that Mississippi classroom that you can dispute what I said I was taught.
So tell me, who are you so I can look you up and we can catch up on old times. And, oh, by the way, what was the name of the school because if you were there in my classroom, then you must remember the name of the school we both attended.
Sorry. That was a little too dismissive. But I’m not getting into a discussion about the cause of the Civil War. I’m sick to death of those and of the excuses/apologists. I was answering the OP about how it was taught.
And I’m saying it wasn’t taught as caused solely by states’ rights OR as a result of slavery, at least not to me. We actually got a fairly even-handed treatment.
I’m just personally sick of people reducing it to “it was about slavery” and “the Confederacy was evil”, when in fact there was a lot more to all of it than that. It’s about as dumb as saying that the American Revolution came about because the colonists didn’t want to pay taxes.
It’s just a convenient simplification of the causes of the war that I feel doesn’t do the actual historical facts any favors.
I grew up in the Deep South. Not Atlanta or Huntsville or Montgomery or New Orleans. But not one of those “new” southern cities like Jacksonsville or Orlando. Nor one of the classic old south cities like Charleston. My city was kinda small but there for a long time. WWII made it big(er).
Or in other words it was a random southern city that got bigger and it was neither “old school south” or basically “yankees relocated”. A mix of both probably.
My high school had a graduating class of 500 give or take. There were a handful in the city that size and about a dozen in the whole county to give you an idea of the size.
We covered the Civil War pretty thoroughly IMO. Slavery wasn’t presented as nice. The North was never presented as anything other than the winners that should have won. At best there was some debate as to the details as when something was right or wrong (as is often seen here).
In high school American history here we covered a handful of big history items. American Revolution. Expansion out west and screwing over of the Indians. Something something about a few other piddly wars. The Civil War. WWI and WWII. And some “famous” historical moments here and there.
The Civil War got its fair share of treatment time wise IMO. And it wasn’t whitewashed either.
I can probably gripe a good bit about my local education, but getting some BS version of the Civil War in high school ain’t one of them.
Well, of course there’s more to it than that, in the same way that there’s more to World War II than “It was about Hitler’s grand vision for the Aryan Race” and “Nazis were evil.” The problem comes about when people deny the evil of the confederacy or downplay the central role protecting and expanding slavery had in the Confederacy’s villainous vision.
Folks who downplay the role of the Holocaust in World War II, or who talk about how morally nuanced the Nazi party were, are justifiably looked at askance. But when people downplay the role of slavery in the Civil War, or talk about the moral nuance of the Confederacy (including putting up statues in honor of them, ferchrissakes), they’re just participating in a 150-year-old tradition of revisionism.
You sure are finicky about stuff like that. It’s an easy question to answer, Maryland is regionally in the South, was a Slave State, but did not join the Confederacy.
Seemed reasonable to include info about such a state in this thread.
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.
I grew up in east Tennessee where teaching on the Civil War included a lot of local history in addition to the larger national level backdrop to the war.
We saw exhibits of the local historical society depicting Union and Confederate recruitment rallies occurring simultaneously in Knoxville.
Overall, we learned that the Civil War was not such a cut-and-dried conflict.While slavery was the overarching cause, it is not accurate to paint with a broad brush about the motivations of the soldiers and civilians involved.
I want to tell you that I very much enjoyed this post. It was really good to hear from someone who gave a personal account based on their own experiences.
I feel as if I learned more from your post that I ever could have learned from text books or other text written by people who were not raised in the South. I know that sounds silly. But I still do feel that way about personal accounts.
Thank you for telling us about your personal experience.
