Protecting Our Children from the Evils of the Civil War

The current hot topic on the message board that I still read but don’t currently participate in is the Civil War era, specifically “fundies” who romanticize the antebellum South or display the Confederate flag without bothering to consider the horrors of slavery, because everyone knows that the Civil War was 95% about slavery and every single southerner at the time was evil and inhumane. I am barely able to restrain myself from signing back on to ask if any of the other posters have ever taken a history class.

I don’t know that much about the Civil War. It always seems to involve long discussions about how General So-and-So led the 37th Infantry up to the top of XYZ Hill, but the sun was in their eyes so they charged too soon and ran right into General Somebody Else and the 126th Artillery or whatever. But I know enough to know that, while slavery was certainly an issue, it wasn’t the only issue. In fact, I would argue that the Civil War was more about states’ rights, and slavery was something that a lot of people felt should be left up to the states. This is just my not-very-educated opinion, but I think the Civil War would have happened even if slavery had already been abolished and I think slavery would have been abolished even if the Civil War hadn’t happened.

Furthermore, I think it’s wrong to assume that everyone in the antebellum South was inherently evil. The majority of white southerners did not own slaves. Along the same lines, most northerners at the time probably weren’t gung-ho for racial equality. Even die-hard abolitionists didn’t necessarily believe blacks and whites were equal.

What really bothers me about the discussion on the message board is that people there seem to want everyone to say, “Slavery was bad. The antebellum South was an evil place because it allowed slavery. Thank goodness the good guys in the North came along to end that atrocity. End of discussion.” But that’s not what studying history is about. Truly studying history involves not just learning about what happened (and what we think of it today), but why. That doesn’t mean we can’t have our own opinions. For example, I’m taking a class on the history of China right now. Am I disgusted by some of the things that happened to the Chinese people during the Mao era? Yes, but I’m able to put my own opinions aside and analyze the bigger picture and the motivations of those who were involved to find out why those things happened and realize that characterizing Mao as nothing more than an evil dictator is horribly one-sided and limiting.

I have several friends who are anthropology majors. According to them, if you want to be an anthropologist one of the first things you have to do is get over any hang-ups you might have about cultures different from yours. If you’re going to study, say, native peoples in the Amazon rain forest, your goal is to understand them and learn about them, not tell them how evil and wrong they are (even if you do think they’re evil and wrong). I view history the same way. Yammering on about how Shakespeare was sexist and everybody in Victorian London was miserable isn’t going to get you any farther towards understanding those different cultures. The fact that they don’t exist anymore shouldn’t make them fair game for every judgmental remark in the book.

It’s fine to want our children to grow up knowing that slavery is bad, but if we really want to keep the past from repeating itself the next generation is going to have to understand a lot more than that.