Reconstruction didn't last long enough
(midwest.social)
PugJesus
ShermanPostingWent through school in the Deep South, the state actually had us take a course focusing specifically on the civil war, think it replaced a semester of social studies and was separate from the standard curriculum. I forgot about it until now, but yeah, it was a pretty dry overview of that time period, a lot of battle dates and very specific details that I can't recall now. Very point blank, "eeyup, we fucked up here, here, here, and here" kind of stuff. A bit surprising looking back at it now, considering how young and where I was at the time.
They refer to it as "The War of Norther Agression" because the states just wanted to be free and have their own rights. Slavery had nothing to do with it.
When you ask them what they wanted the freedom to do the answer was always own slaves. Even the state constitutions stated it as a right.
If you actually look at the reconstruction period it never really happened at all. Which is largely because Lincoln's successor didn't believe in it.
Johnson sabotaged everything he could, but Grant was a good Union boy and put in 8 years of effort in Reconstruction.
Shame about Grant's choice of 'friends'.
Loved grandmother calling it the War of Northern Aggression.
Mother shut that shit down right quick though.
The war of southern aggression. Only started because the south wouldn't let us free the enslaved people who entered northern states.
If I remember correctly the British have a different name for the War for Independence, and downplay it like it's no big deal.
we didn't really learn about it in high school. from memory we did the Tudors, the Stewarts, the Romans, Boudica, the Egyptians, Great Fire of London, Norman invasion, the black Plague, WW1, WW2, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Renaissance, The Enlightenment.
edit: plus the Raj
and we do some on the slave trade and America is mentioned but not the main character and civil rights/suffrage which does mention more American stuff (Rosa parks, MLK)
tbf that's much more reasonable.
The war for states rights ^to^ ^enslave^ ^people^
And also the states' rights to legally force other states to return self-liberated former-slaves to their former enslavers.
The Confederate Constitution also made it compulsory for all states to be slave states.
It was about states' rights, specifically taking rights away from states
States Rights to violate rights.
I want to dispell a misconception that keeps getting spread as a gotcha. It was never about states rights. No not even states right to slavery. It was about the preservations AND expansion of slavery. States did not and were not allowed to ban slavery. Read the consitution of the confederacy. It is almost a copy and paste of the US constitution but with minor changes that both empower and disempower the executive branch, but also banning the outlaw of slavery among one or two other slavery stuff. If it was about states rights to slavery, they would allow their states to ban it cause it would be their right to choose. But it was never that, they wanted slavery to expand. Even if you add the caveate of slavery to the "states right" myth, you are still perpetuating the myth. Just a less savory version of the myth.
The only way it was about states rights was how it was about establishing slavery as a right that could not be infringed.
Is the states rights issue when mentioned in any letters of secession, I wonder? Kinda doubt it...
But slavery is explicitly named as an issue in every single one, so yeah..
Not that I disagree, but is that just an aside, or did I miss an implication in the screenshot?
An aside, directed at the comments
Grew up in the South. Learned that it was a Civil War about slavery. What was taught was a brief overview, maybe at best a week, far more is covered now in a single Youtube video. And definitely didn't learn about the darker parts of the war or the aftermath, including atrocities that happened locally to blacks who were managing to find a path from their days of bondage (Wilmington, Tulsa, plenty of others). I get that everything can't be covered in grade school and often times the basics taught is not only the bare minimum but even incorrect because the details are far too many and are university level courses of their own. But I was shocked as an adult that someone wasn't mentioned. The Civil War was almost glorified in the little we really learned.
I also grew up in the South, and my experience was also definitely a lot more limited and "both sides" coded than what I've heard from others I know who grew up in the north. Very much driven by the lost cause myth.
Slavery was billed as an unfortunate consequence of the South, lumped in with other "it was a different time" hand-waves of historical atrocities. The North was still sorta branded as the "good guys," but in a way that implied the Civil War was still necessary for the North to realize its "neglect" of Southern issues. And Southern leaders (still enslavers all, but again, "different time") were upheld as heroes who did the right thing by nobly fighting for their homes after the (again regrettable but still necessary) acts of secession. The "Union" and the Confederacy were basically framed like sports teams, with each side having pros and cons, and the Civil War was taught as a necessary reconciliation of their differences.
I also put "Union" in quotations because I learned more recently that even this type of language plays into the lost cause myth. It encourages people to think of the Union and the Confederacy as equal peers that emerged from a collapsed United States, and only by rejoining with the Union could the United States exist once again. The reality is that the United States never collapsed, and the aftermath of the Civil War was not a reunification, but the defeat of an unjust rebellion.
Defeat? The aftermath was the subversion of any attempt to hold the traitors responsible. Set everything up for the "business plot/coup", which was a successful silent coup of the federal government. This country has always been fucked.
When I taught Civil War and Reconstruction just outside Atlanta I had no problem teaching it as accurately and truthfully as possible. My students understood the concept of slavery and how awful it is very well. Nobody censored me in any way. I had a blast teaching fourth and fifth grade social studies.
Thank you for doing the Union's work, sir or ma'am! o7
Thank you for teaching me something new every day. You are appreciated.
i still believe that slavery ended mostly because it's expensive and inefficient. if you treat people like that they die after 3 years and you have to buy new slaves ... meanwhile if you treat them better they live much longer and that's much cheaper for the economy overall ... so we have prison labor now which is the same thing but less abrasive.
That was an argument made at the time for those who wished to 'let' slavery die a 'natural' death.
I think such a point misses that the North and the South were not one society or even one economic system. Slavery perpetuates itself not because it's economically efficient (it's not, generally) but because it empowers elites who then leverage that power to preserve that power. They won't let it go unless it's torn from them - the North had the advantage of having never really been a 'slave society'; slavery was permitted before it was banned, but slave-dependent elites were never a majority of power in the North.
It was always going to come down to coercion - whether through a prolonged struggle, or through the acquiescence of the slavers to an overwhelming threat of force. We had the former. I don't think the latter would have been possible without the South being a much smaller proportion of the country, economically, demographically, and geographically.
I grew up in Texas in the middle of the countryside and we still learned about the civil war being southern states rights for slavery. Like, I have no clue what places are teaching what these morons are learning, but middle of nowhere Texas still taught it properly so 🤷
I also grew up in Texas in the 90s and during our Texas History courses, they liked to sweep under the rug that that Texas independence was basically because the Mexican govt outlawed slavery on 1829 and didn't want anyone owning slaves or bringing more over anymore.
Re: the Civil War, there was LOTS of "lost cause" and "states rights" apologist language in our text books. The teachers didn't really dwell on that but the books did.
Also a matter of how up-to-date your textbooks are, and when you grew up. It was definitely common in the Deep South as recently as the 90s.
I grew up in Tar Heel North Carolina, they showed us...not Roots but imagine other movies you'd put in a playlist with Roots. I remember one where they cut a slave's finger off for learning to read. In NASCAR Tobacco Cotton Cackalacky. They tried to tedious it up with locations and dates of battles but they made no bones about how awful the institution of chattel slavery was in the American South.
Even my community college American history class in 2002 (just an hour south of Atlanta) was chock full of Lost Cause nonsense.
I didn't even recognize it at the time since it was the same stuff my dad taught me. He was a really smart guy who read a lot of history and was particularly interested in the Civil War, so I didn't have a lot of reason to question things until later when I learned what the Lost Cause actually was.
It was always tied up in so many family stories too, and the idea of those 'damn yankees and carpet baggers", it was a part of my identity and history. It was just all around me, like the air, and so it was weird and kinda hard to unlearn that stuff, but not unwelcome.
I think maybe folks raised outside the south don't see all that stuff, how that culture permeates everything. Or maybe they think it's just a bunch of stupid rednecks who've never picked up a book, I'm never quite sure 😅
At least the more modern textbooks I've seen do a much better job at telling the proper story!
At least the more modern textbooks I’ve seen do a much better job at telling the proper story!
Not for long
In the South (Texas is not The South, it's Texas)
EDIT: I'm not saying this as an insult to Texas. It's a distinct culture from the deep south in the US. Texans will no doubt agree that they are built different.
I get the feeling the actual revisionist history texts are in Indiana and Ohio, the deep red Midwest.
Ohio was the powerhouse of the north. Ohio Civil war history classes were less focused on the atrocities of the slaver, but that was so there could be more focus on the underground railroad, the indignity to both humanity and Ohio of the fugitive slave act, and many of the ohioan heroes of the war like Grant, Sherman, and Brown. We didn't learn as much about Oberlin as a hotbed of anti slaver resistance than you'd think though.
But yeah, despite the traitors rags that've slowly crept into the state there's a reason why Columbus's hockey team is named a reference to union soldiers.
Also it wasn't deep red until recently. It was a victim of redmap, extreme gerrymandering, and propaganda, but Ohio went to Obama twice and had a blue senator until last year.
Oddly, having grown up in rural Indiana in the 90s, I actually had really solid education through and through. We had honest decent coverage of the Civil War and it was emphasized how awful things were for the slaves. Same with WWII.
Can’t speak for the whole state ofc, but my school at least did a good job.
