The Southern Rewriting of History

The South has a brutal history of black oppression, including slavery, which eventually led to the Civil War. But, if you were born in the South, you were probably not told that was the reason the South revolted against the North. You were probably told that the South revolted because the North was attacking the rights of the Southern states. This is a revision of history, designed to cover up their brutal and racist past.

Hate not Heritage

Monuments in the South are not about heritage, but about maintaining the foundation for white supremacy to flourish, and controversy around removing them, despite what many Southerners say, is not new. These statues were mostly created by a group called “The United Daughters of the Confederacy'' who put these statues up to honor the fallen Confederates. While some Southerners say that the reason for the Confederate statues is because they want to honor their heritage, they were created to honor those who had died for slavery and intimidate black people. In 1932, a leading African American newspaper in Chicago asked if its readers would support the federal law that would abolish the Confederate monuments and the collective response was a resounding “yes.” African Americans protested statues in their communities after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

Another claim of some people is that if we remove the Confederate statues then we’re erasing history. Contrary to popular belief, the majority of Confederate monuments were built after the Civil War, during the Jim Crow Era, and during the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s. These monuments were not built to honor the Confederate soldiers and generals, but rather, to instill fear into African Americans and embolden the most dangerous white supremacist terrorist groups. But how could so many people be wrong about the Confederate statues? It starts with how people in the South have been intentionally miseducated regarding the central issue of the Civil War: Slavery.

How The South Propagandizes Their Students

The South often touts the myth of the lost cause to justify the Confederacy’s war with the North. An article by Jack Shwartz details the components of the lost cause. The myth says, firstly, that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. Secondly, it claims that the War was a struggle for Southern independence against Northern aggression. And lastly, that slaves “never sought their freedom but were only too glad to be civilized by the superior race.”

For many Americans, these claims are recognizable as the lies that they are. But that is not the case in the South. In Southern schools, the textbook often leaves out the brutality of slavery and the history of rape and murder committed by slave owners. The South does not teach kids the brutality of slavery, they only emphasize how “compassionate” the slave owners were. Cynthia Greenlee states that even though 150 years have passed since slavery was abolished, the educational material taught to the students still emphasizes the “compassion” of slave owners. Some textbooks try to say that there was “beauty” in the relationship between the slave owners and slaves. They try to tell children that slavery was an indentured servitude since some Southern states had no legal framework for slavery. Only eight percent of Texas high school students surveyed knew slavery was the central cause of the Civil War. In 2015, Texas textbooks stated that slaves were “immigrant workers.”

Another myth propagandized by the South is that most of the Confederate soldiers fought to protect their states and not the institution of slavery. This is also wrong. Over half of them either owned slaves or lived in a household that did hold slaves. Many more rented land for slave owners. The soldiers’ fears were not about their home states, but rather that if slavery was abolished they would be forced to live and work with the free blacks.

These claims are false. The real reason for the Civil War was one thing: slavery. If anyone thinks that is Northern revisionist history, take the words of a group of Mississippi lawmakers of the time. They said, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.” Those are the words of history coming down to our present-day--and we cannot ignore them.

Clearly, the South has abandoned the truth to instead maintain a rosy picture of the Confederacy. This creates an echo chamber, where the atrocities of slavery are omitted, and an environment is fostered where racism can flourish and white supremacy can maintain a powerful influence on American society. This is the opposite of how Germany taught their students about World War II and the atrocities committed by the Nazis. They make their students explore how ordinary citizens participated in the Holocaust, and educate the students on how to stop it from ever happening again.

Remove the Hate

During the summer of 2020, there was a reckoning on race that made Americans reimagine the history of slavery. It made us look at the systematic racism that still plagues our institutions. While both the North and the South perpetuated racism for decades after the Civil War, the South embraced a different history than the North, causing them to believe false reasons for the South’s secession. The South must face the truth of their history and the horrors of slavery, or else American white supremacy will persist forever.