lies about the civil war my history teacher told me (tw)

[cimorene]

I grew up in Alabama from first grade on and attended public school there, a transplant from the North at the age of 7. Many people are aware that a Confederate apologism is taught about Civil War history throughout the south, one full of outright lies, the results of the same whitewashing campaign spearheaded by the Daughters of the Confederacy which erected confederate statues around the country after the Reconstruction ended in 1877.

When I was fed this bullshit at 14, I was prepared for it to be wrong, and I found that none of my classmates (about 50% southerners, the remainder being the children of transplants associated with the local university) were convinced either. I was revolted and angered at the time, but the more time passes, the worse it all looks to me - which is not usually the case since normally an adult understanding of human foibles and better empathy at least conveys some understanding of the mistakes of the adults around me, which I was fairly unforgiving of as a child. But this is different.

Here are the main features of the propaganda:

• Slavery was full of pain and deliberate torture and cruelty, but in Alabama everyone is taught the lie that "most slaveowners were "good" owners, who were kind and treated their slaves well, because after all, you wouldn't damage your valuable property"


• Most slaves wanted freedom, but in Alabama everyone is taught the lie that "most slaves were happy enough where they were and didn't want a different life"


• Slaves escaping to join the Union forces, and helping them, were a huge help to the Union victory, and they risked brutal deaths and torture to do it, but everyone in Alabama is taught the lie that "Most slaves were loyal and affectionate to their owners and lots of them even went to fight for the Confederacy with them". There were few slaves fighting for the Confederacy, and most of them had no choice.


• The Civil War was explicitly about slavery and the secession statements and numerous speeches say as much in so many words, but in Alabama everyone is taught the lie that "it wasn't really about slavery, it was mostly about states' rights." The right to own slaves, it is said, was merely the last straw and there were plenty of other states' rights that made everyone ALMOST secede before, like taxes and things like that, because the south was righteously angry about the promise of independent government for the states with little federal regulation from the time of the Constitution and Revolutionary War being broken. This is a lie. It was about slavery. It's true that the South was explicitly and implicitly allowed to continue with slavery at the time of the Revolutionary War, because the rest of the colonies made a devil's bargain when they allied with slaveholders to defeat England; they couldn't have done it otherwise, and it was an ideological schism from the first that made many abolitionists, like Alexander Hamilton, rather unhappy. But the laws that were passed at every stage were laws that the original constitution allowed the government to pass and the Constitution was agreed to by all the powerful slaveholders among the 'founding fathers' like Washington and Jefferson.


• Federal troops were in the South helping to make sure slaves were actually freed and given voting rights for just 12 years after the end of the Civil War. Black citizens began voting and electing representatives; federal troops helped protect them from mob violence and laws were initially passed to allow redress, but the Supreme Court overturned these in 1870 and in 1877 the federal government capitulated to the widespread southern insurrections and withdrew from the South, allowing the creation of the institutionalized systems of oppression and organized mob violence intended to deprive them of all agency and power. In Alabama, in contrast, everyone is taught that the "so-called Reconstruction" was a horrible period of Southern victimization by thuggish jackbooted rule from bitter Northern invaders who gleefully destroyed property and stole from Southerners with impunity out of a mean-spirited desire to humble them, while "carpetbaggers" (the term is taught), greedy Northerners eager to make a quick buck, streamed South and took advantage of military support to seize Southern resources for themselves while outrageously thumbing their noses at noble Southern culture. The enforcement role of Northern troops is not mentioned, nor are the struggles and Southern resistance faced in freeing and enfranchising the former slaves.

The more I think about it, the more unforgiveable I find the act of teaching this propaganda. I've recently started to think that each teacher who passed along these lies - which, yes, are mandated by the state curriculum, so I'll say each teacher who passed it along without making clear where it was a lie - is individually responsible for the harm they cause, and that harm is systemic. I used to make excuses for the southern system along the lines that the southern history teachers were educated in the same propaganda from childhood, but outside of the strictest fundamentalist cults, that doesn't really hold water; these are college-educated people who had to study history at a higher level (a minor concentration alongside their major in education) in order to teach it in secondary school. These are adults with adult responsibility and intelligence who live in the world and have witnessed racial injustice their whole lives, who have the ability to recognize patterns and who don't have the excuse of rejecting the reliability of facts and the knowledge of authorities. My history teachers may have been brainwashed, but I knew them and their intelligence well enough to say that if they were deceived about racial reality around them and the history of the Civil War, it's because they wanted to be deceived.

You don't have to have reason to mistrust the source in advance to reject an idea like slavery being "kind" or a "big proportion" of people being contented with it or happy about it; it's an idea that the unprepared and uneducated default human instinctively rejects. Anyone who has ever allowed themselves to be persuaded of this laughable claim has had to work hard to suppress their empathy and knowledge of other people to do so! Yet they have the shamelessness to feed this bullshit to the entire public school population and require them to learn it and recite it back for a grade.

My history teacher had her Confederate reenactor husband come to the school and give a presentation in uniform to us, showing off his Civil War memorabilia! At the time I was angry, yes, but now I can hardly believe it. I have no idea where to find her now but I've toyed idly with the idea that she and everyone like her deserve personal letters of rebuke in light of current events. I mean, I wouldn't because it would be likely fruitless and I shy from social contacts in general, but I do feel that every teacher out there in her situation owes society and their students an apology.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Yeah, it really is inexcusable and it goes on to this day, I'm afraid.

Packing boards of education with Lost Causers really really worked. But the ideas are still quite mainstream in the South.

Also the impact of the state of Texas on textbooks is something long understood but no one seems willing to do anything about it.

I just read an amazing book about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the author points out that junior high history was not intended to tell the truth but to make sure kids felt happy about living in their state.

[cimorene]

State history year was in 4th in Alabama in my day, but the Civil War is part of the 8th grade curriculum in American history and that was in 8th, so right before high school. In fact, there's another layer of national history in the state curriculum I believe, but there's exemption for International Bacchalaureate pupils to take world history and history of the Americas instead. We might have missed a bit of propaganda there.

The "gifted and talented" teacher who taught us Civil War history was ironically the most intelligent and gifted teacher in my three years of middle school and an award winner who was most likely the best in the school. She was very politically progressive and shared many of my nerdy interests, but she was also the only one married to a Civil War reenactor and likely gave the worst Civil War propaganda experience! We had a huge group project that lasted over 6 weeks in that unit and divided up the class into groups who had to make their projects in the form of fictional first person accounts from soldiers, widows, politicians and slaves. These were all supposed to be in the form of a collection of correspondence or diary entries, but I thought it was missing the entire point to make a written journal for a slave when the very motivation behind the war was intimately tied to the fact that only a vanishingly small percent of a percent of slaves were allowed to learn to read and write! I argued with her passionately about this, but she wouldn't allow a memoir dated after the fact, she wanted first person epistolary fiction spanning the length of the war only, and suggested to the whole class that making the slave pov "more realistic" would be writing in black dialect and including errors. 😨

[princessofgeeks]

This is just awful.

[cathexys]

Not to defend the institutional racism that permeates public schools in AL, but having seen at least two students' textbooks and teaching in the past few years...at least my kids' school and its teachers were a lot more insightful than I'd expected. Is there still a lot of racism? Most certainly! But the present tense of your statements might not be completely correct!

(Having said that, I was amazed at the divergence I've seen in my incoming freshmen depending on which part of the state and which school district they're from. And part of the problem, as PoG points out, is bad textbooks that, in many places, are hopelessly outdated.)

[cimorene]

I can hope that the overall curriculum has evolved a bit then! My teacher didn't use a textbook much because she was an 'expert', which is something plenty of good teachers do I guess and in most cases would be a benefit. But aren't your kids in college already?

[cathexys]

They are, but the younger one just graduated HS and the older one went through it in the last 5 years. And I was really impressed by their history teachers in particular, foregrounding a conceptual approach to history rather than a dates and facts one and definitely leaning more into A People's History than I'd have expected in secondary school in the US let alone in AL.

[cimorene]

My upper high school history teacher actually introduced us to Zinn as well, although he didn't cover that much of it. He was the best history teacher I had actually, specifically because he was big on concepts and narratives too. But I think the Civil War propaganda was all concentrated in 8th grade in the curriculum when I went through and that is really the key spot, much more so than other parts of American history that have been mythologized and whitewashed nationwide, like Manifest Destiny, the native genocides and Vietnam; they're not as closely emotionally tied to people's identities as this Civil War stuff is to many southerners. Doing a decent job on Vietnam probably doesn't establish whether this guy would have done a better job on the Civil War than the teacher who covered it for me.