Civil War lessons often depend on where the class is located

AUSTIN, Texas—The Civil War lessons taught to American students often depend on where the classroom is, with schools presenting accounts of the conflict that vary from state to state and even district to district.

Some schools emphasize states’ rights in addition to slavery and stress how economic and cultural differences stoked tensions between North and South. Others highlight the battlefield acumen of Confederate commanders alongside their Union counterparts. At least one suggests that abolition represented the first time the nation lived up to its founding ideals.

The differences don’t always break down neatly along geographic lines.

“You don’t know, as you speak to folks around the country, what kind of assumptions they have about things like the Civil War,” said Dustin Kidd, a sociology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Lessons on the war and its causes usually begin in the fifth through eighth grades. That means attitudes toward the war may be influenced by what people learned at an age when many were choosing a favorite color or imagining what they wanted to be when they grew up.

The effect may not be obvious until a related issue is thrust into the spotlight, like this month’s violence in Charlottesville, Va., and the resulting backlash against Confederate symbols.

Growing up in Charlottesville, Kidd said, he was taught that “folks from the North” had put forward the “misconception” that slavery was the cause of the war. The real origin, he was told, could be traced to groups of colonists from England who despised each other long before the rebellion began in 1861. Not until graduate school did he begin to question that premise.

Confederate sympathizers have long promoted the “Lost Cause” theory that the Southern side was heroic against impossible odds, and that slavery was not the driving force behind the war. Edward Countryman, a history professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said he learned that idea growing up in New York state in the 1950s.

“I recall my father coming home when I was about 8 or 9 with two Civil War caps, one’s gray and one’s blue. And I wanted the gray one,” Countryman said. “The belief, strongly, that the Civil War had been about anything but slavery was very, very powerful.”

A 2011 Pew Research Center poll found that 48 percent of Americans said the Civil War was mainly about states’ rights, compared with 38 percent who said its main cause was slavery. Nine percent said both factors were equal.

The divide in opinions broke down more by race than geography. Forty-eight percent of whites chose states’ rights over slavery, while 39 percent of blacks did. But 49 percent of self-described Southern whites chose states’ rights compared with 48 percent of whites who did not consider themselves Southern.

The president of the Texas NAACP said finding “kinder” ways to describe the war’s origins masks racism.

“States’ rights is about the whole idea of permitting slavery and allowing the South to do what they do, or, after slavery, to allow the South to engage in Jim Crow,” Gary Bledsoe said. “You can’t sanitize history and have history report that master and slave were out there singing ‘Kumbaya’ in the fields.”

Texas has 178 confederate monuments. Only Virginia has more, with 223, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights advocacy group.

Democratic state Rep. Eric Johnson, meanwhile, is demanding the removal of a nearly 60-yearold plaque rejecting slavery as the Civil War’s “underlying cause.” Republican House Speaker Joe Straus has called for checking the accuracy of that plaque and nearly a dozen other Confederate symbols located around the state Capitol alone.

When curriculum standards were approved in 2010 by Texas’ Republican-controlled Board of Education, debate focused on slavery being a Civil War “after issue.”

The state’s fifth- and seventh-graders taking Texas history courses, and eighth-graders taking U.S. history, are now asked to identify the causes of the war, “including sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery.”

Eighth-graders also compare ideas from Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address with those from Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address, which did not mention slavery and instead endorsed small-government values still popular with many conservatives today.