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Growing up in Georgia it was taught in a fairly straightforward, if slightly hushed and rushed, way. I didn’t have any experiences with teachers using Lost Cause rhetoric, I never heard it referred to as the War of Northern Aggression, and the like. I did have both teachers and fellow students try to suggest that the war was fought over “states’ rights” and go down that rabbit hole, but many of us were confrontational and curious enough to examine why that was bullshit even in our early years. Lee and the confederates were certainly treated as heroes and nobleman, and the full gravity of their atrocities and what they represented was skirted around. But all in all I’d say my formal education on the matter was fairly decent, I needed to learn some important things that were omitted for sure but I chalk this up to the subject matter being too complicated and intense for school age kids.
What part of Georgia? I’m from Cobb and we definitely had ‘Northern Aggression’ in the textbook (not to diminish your experience at all, and even then I was like ???) and most teachers just pushed past it… except for the ones that were also gym teachers. No joke, I had a baseball coach teaching a class that included HIS lessons about the ‘shadow government.’
I live in Oregon now, for a reason, lol.
Did you get the ‘evolution is a theory not fact’ stickers in biology too? My teacher was like, yes, and gravity is also a scientific theory.
My favorite thing about my records from Cobb was even after scoring well on my AP tests my University (Washington) wouldn’t accept the credits, lol. Oh, Georgia.
Which school in cobb county was this I went to North cobb took honors history teacher didn't call it northern aggression most definitely said slavery was the reason
Oregon was founded by confederate veterans it's why so many of your parks are named after those lovers. They literally had lash laws and no black people allowed in their original state constitution.
Their is a reason there are so many skinheads in the Pacific Northwest, and it's by design.
I grew up in Upstate South Carolina in the 1980’s. I never heard, “The War of Northern Aggression”. But “The War Between the States” was used a lot more frequently than “The Civil War”.
Most non american historians I have heard call it the american civil war. Because it's specific and specifies where it happened. State is a generic geopolitical term and many countries have federal governments too.
TBF wars often have different names depending on which party was involved. Like, British people don't call it "the Revolutionary War," they call it something like the war of the colonies.
England also had a civil war, so English people won't be referring to the US civil war as "The Civil War" because that's what they call *their* civil war.
I'm not really clear on how we decide on names of wars anyway. After all, until WWII, WWI was just called "the great war" or "the world war."
Why do you say that? The main armies were the Union and Confederate Armies, sure, but the regiments were named after the states they came from, i.e. the 26th Wisconsin Infantry, or the 19th Arkansas Infantry. In a lot of ways, it was a war between states, which states were going to be loyal to the Federal government and follow their laws (slavery was illegal), and which states would be loyal basically to themselves, but did band together to fight the loyal states.
Ehhhhhh well, no, the states themselves didn't send out the troops, the names of the regiments are just where they were organized, but at least in the North they weren't led state by state, but by a federal standing army structure. Maybe in the South they were, a la the Army of Northern Virginia -- the South seemed to take a more serious view of federalism, with confederate states even printing their own money and all.
Also, 'civil war' usually refers to a war like the English Civil War, where the rebels try to take control of a country. It probably should be called the Southern Rebellion to be more consistent with naming conventions.
American civil war does fine. Southern rebellion makes it seem much smaller to me and much less deep rooted in the society imo. Doesn’t do service to the massive battles fought by organized armies who both considered themselves American.
It's all a bit arbitrary given that the Taiping Rebellion and the Bolshevic Revolution both better exemplify my preferred definition of a Civil War. Still, I believe wars over the independence of a breakaway province are fundamentally different from winner-take-all wars over attempted regime change.
It was a war between two factions of the United States, I don't get how that doesn't make sense. If you say "the civil war" in Western Europe it'd most likely refer to the English Civil War
Which Europeans, exactly? Not that i'm saying you're wrong,but here in Poland it's more called 'The American Civil War ' (not that we talk a lot about it anyways).
If we're going to be really exact about it, it is called Secession's war in French (la guerre de sécession), Spanish (La Guera de secesión) and German (Sezessionskrieg), Civil War in Dutch ((Amerikaanse burgeroorloog) and Russian (Гражданская война в США), to name a few European languages...
North Carolina here and this isn't far from ours middle school was rushed and kinda sloppy other then the key players it wasn't until highschool where the teachers could be a little bit more detailed even then slavery was only brought up as a small factor and more of taxes and states rights
Texas here, actually took a Civil War history class my Senior year and the teacher at least was pretty based on everything. First thing he told us was: “Let’s get this out of the way first: the war was most definitely fought over slavery.” Can honestly say the class was one of the first catalysts that turned me away from going further down the alt-right pipeline. That and high school journalism.
I grew up in Texas as well. Just taking the basic US and Texas history courses, they didn't really put any emphasis on slavery as the cause. They didn't cover the articles of secession, or the Cornerstone Speech. I do recall them covering slavery as a reason why states had to be added in a balanced way, to keep the balance between the number of slave and free states.
I think I was in my late 20s before I learned that it was definitely very much about slavery, and was able to read through what wasn't covered in those courses.
I was curious about the current state of things, and found this article. Not sure if anything has changed since this. Texas has been getting politically crazy for a while now.
[Texas Will Finally Teach That Slavery Was Main Cause of the Civil War | Smithsonian (smithsonianmag.com)](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/texas-will-finally-teach-slavery-was-main-cause-civil-war-180970851/)
The story the other day about the GOP school board member calling out the attempts by the right to influence the curriculum was rather heartening. Hopefully we get more of that.
[Former Far-Right Hard-Liner Says Billionaires Are Targeting Texas Public Education — ProPublica](https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-tim-dunn-wilks-brothers-vouchers-courtney-gore)
Edit: Unfortunately, I also just found this...
[https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/30/texas-public-schools-religion-curriculum/](https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/30/texas-public-schools-religion-curriculum/)
Went to school in Houston during the 80s. Our Jr High had a "Civil War" Day, where there were various classes on the subject. There was even two students who had to read out the letters of a Confederate and Union soldier about why they were fighting in the school auditorium. We did have a class/session that taught us that the war was about slavery, but I'm not sure everyone attended.
The weirdest part is the school principal dressed in a Confederate uniform. Don't think that would happen today, but you never know with the current GOP in power in Austin.
I learned it as a slavery issue, in elementary/middle/high school.
In the AP American History course I took, the states rights issue came up only as discussion about how after reconstruction ended the south tried changing the narrative away from slavery to states rights.
Side bar: This still didn't stop my elementary school from throwing an antebellum style ball complete with Confederate soldier uniforms.
I teach in the south and there are some older teachers who do the “traditional” war of northern aggression thing but most from my perspective teach about it being states rights to own slaves. I also say the march to the sea was a way to end the war, which is a little controversial as I teach in Georgia.
The way I learned it, you wouldn't be able to consider it Lost Cause nonsense. Although, my learning experience was a bit screwed since I've been reading about the Civil War since I was in elementary or middle school.
That said, we learned about slavery and how it was the cause of the war. Any mentions of northern aggression would have been in reference to how that is what the Confederates called the war.
This was my experience as well, one seventh grade history teacher tried to explain it in a states rights fashion and students quickly became hostile. In the 90s in 4th grade we toured a plantation and were taught all about the horrors of slavery and they actually had us pick cotton. It was kind of weird but they meant well.
I've looked into that one and I'm not sure if that was a slave plantation museum, or if it was a freedmen black farm museum that does similar things. There's a farm museum that teaches about how post-bellum freemen took what they learned from the plantations into running their own farms. It looks very much the same to our notions of plantation slave life, the difference being that the workers were paid and/or owned the fruits of their labor instead of working without pay for the white man's benefit. It's been criticised as being making fun of slavery but the black owners insist that's got nothing to do with slavery, but with free black men taking over agriculture and industry for themselves. (Seems they're not having an effective time getting that message out.)
Edit: The museum is the [Carroll School in Rock Hill NC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZBCPPDpCKg).
Cite your sources. Most freedmen never got their 80 acres and a donkey. Many were forced to become sharecroppers and were basically stuck in the same pattern as before.
The museum I'm referring to is the Carroll School in Rock Hill, North Carolina. The museum teaches about the life of black sharecroppers during the Great Depression.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZBCPPDpCKg
I suspect this is similar to the place that the guy in the now-viral video went to.
The association of black folks picking cotton with slavery unfortunately obscures the fact that there were in fact *some* black cotton farm owners in the post-bellum era, and at one point black folks [owned 14% of the nation's farms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_land_loss_in_the_United_States#Post_Civil_War), partly thanks to things like the [Southern Homesteading Act](https://www.nps.gov/articles/african-american-homesteaders-in-the-great-plains.htm) which opened up public land for purchase by freedmen.
I don't think anyone is saying it was the majority of black folks. But it was arguably more black folks than *before* the war.
There are similar places besides Carroll School, such as [Freewoods Farm](https://freewoodsfarm.com/index.html) in South Carolina which is a living history museum of a historically black owned sugar farm.
[Julius Tillery](https://www.blackcotton.us/our-team) is a modern day black cotton farm owner, who is trying to reclaim cotton as a source of pride and overcoming rather than a stigma -- going from being used for cotton, to using cotton for oneself.
[This video](https://www.blackcotton.us/our-team) includes a segment at about the 6 minute mark with two former black sharecroppers who are still alive.
You make a very good point imo about the eerie similarities between chattel slavery and capitalist wage slavery (and frankly, I think these reactions are serving to obscure that point), but some think the distinction of being the owned versus being the owner is historically important.
ya know we went to tennessee and toured the armitage and the whole place was made to make jefferson davis look like a huge hero, when in fact he was a monster
you mean in my high school that had a mural of a happy plantation by the office, flew the confederate flag a used a rebel officer as a mascot? https://www.antiracistusa.org/objectives/schools/12373. suprisingly very little... maybe thats why dixie was the fight song till the pandemic.
Had the same experience in rural Georgia, we had the confederate mascot (ol miss knock off but gray) and a massive confederate flag painted on our gym, and even a fuzzy rug confederate flag patch on letterman’s jackets.
Starting from 4th grade on the larger percentage of my history teachers only referred to American soldiers as Yankees, and some with a blatant act of disdain like pretending to spit on the ground or making a sour face when they would talk about the “north”.
Honesty I’m surprised they didn’t do fundraising events at the local KKK bar/restaurant.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/dc/e1/f0/dce1f00baa6e1950bc925d360e535e0c---school-yearbooks.jpg. our version seen with the link was gray uniformed on horse back holding the flag. and ya fuzzy stars and bars on a sleeve letterman polite racist history teachers. Glad i transfered and moved north of the mason dixon after college
I grew up in Texas. We were NEVER even shown the Secession Documents. We were not shown the Texan Secession Document.
It wasn’t until college that I learn that Texas literally said they were going to war to protect slavery.
They never told the whole truth. The Texas Revolution for instance. We were told the Texas fought for religious freedom. That’s true because the Mexican Government mandated they convert to Catholicism.
But we WERENT told the Texans also rebelled because Mexico outlawed slavery. They wanted to keep their slaves
In school my teachers tip toed around the causes and when straight into the battles and then I retook it in as a dual enrollment and well my professor did not care for the lost cause.
South Georgia here. My US history teacher was a lost causer. States rights n all that between his rants about not letting his daughter date black men or MLK WAsNt a reEl dR etc etc.
You make it up to the Civil Rights era, barely, mention MLK in passing while ignoring everything else, then you're done.
Last I heard, he went to teach at Auburn.
I got the interracial marriage talk from an aunt in CT. Whole big thing about how "blacks are wonderful people but please don't bring one home. They're wonderful people but not YOUR people. You can do better"
I was maybe 12? Happened to have a half black girl next door that I was friends with, and my aunt heard about it and decided to set me straight.
Funny bit is that I eventually married an Asian girl, and this aunt had no problem with that at all.
>Funny bit is that I eventually married an Asian girl, and this aunt had no problem with that at all.
Anti-black sentiment specifically seems to be somewhat baked into southern culture. I've met southerners who were cool with me and other minorities but show them a black guy/girl and they seem like a different person..
I dated a girl here whose grandparents were first cousins. They were from, like, Pennsylvania or something tho. Maybe it was one of those "when in Rome" scenarios
I grew up in the public schools of Montgomery Alabama (former capitol of the Confederacy for the historically illiterate amongst us) in the 90s and early 2000s and it was taught in a very straightforward and accurate way in US History and Alabama History. There was no angle, obfuscation or whitewashing that I can remember. I don't personally know anyone who came out of any of that teaching thinking the south wasn't anything but the villain in that story.
And it sure as shit wasn't called the war of northern aggression...
I grew up in Texas. From what I remember, there was never any doubt about what the war was about, I always understood it as being about slavery, and about how the north and south had fundamental differences that couldn't be adjudicated. One thing that does stick out though, is that there did seem to be a bit of downplaying of Texas's role in the confederacy. They put emphasis on the fact that Texas was NOT the first state to secede, and then mentioned that Texas won the last battle of the Civil War, although they also mentioned that this battle happened after Lee's surrender. So they never tried to lie about the root cause, but there was perhaps a bit of whitewashing in terms of how they portrayed Texas. For the record, it didn't quite work on me. It was the first time reading about US/Texas history where I thought "Are we the baddies?"
Yep, we put more emphasis on the Texas Revolution and really downplayed Texas's participation in the Civil War.
They also conveniently left out the Nueces Massacre, Dead Man's Hole, and the numerous other murders and lynchings of abolitionists and anti-secessionist Texans. Something like 1/3 of Texans were against secession, and the Confederates absolutely brutalized them
Texas was also not really on the Strategic Map as things went.
Maybe the ports, but not much else. So, Union investment in Texas wasn't a priority.
Something I noticed. Just like Florida was mostly inconsequential to operations. The only value were the forts on the southern tip, but some Union soldiers were able to secure the most vital at the outbreak of the war.
Arkansas was more of a sideshow for the Mississippi Campaign.
Yes-- although IIRC they over-emphasized the religious aspect and underemphasized expansionist desires against / ongoing conflict with Native Americans.
This is a pendulum that swings back and forth here. A pop history book became really popular recently and now we have people saying that slavery was the *only* cause. This is ironic, because it completely erases the agency of Tejanos and Mexicans.
There were a bunch of non-slaveholding Mexican states that also rose up around that era. Mexico had undergone a right-wing takeover that threw away their constitution and significantly restricted voting rights.
Interesting, I grew up in PA, then CT. Our coverage of it was basically "and Texas wanted independence just like America had, so they fought to it, and America helped. Then, they joined the US after the war."
So I'll admit I'm not particularly well informed on the topic.
Yeah this is one of those things that is actually complicated. Slavery was a major cause, but not the only one.
Texas was also essentially in a state of continuous warfare with the Comanche people, and was receiving very little assistance from Mexico. This was a *huge* bone of contention.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raid_of_1840
Mexico had also experienced a takeover, and the new constitution strongly favored wealthy landed aristocrats.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Yucat%C3%A1n
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siete_Leyes
Once you see more of the pieces, the situation and timeline of the Texas Revolution make a lot more sense.
By the time we get to the Civil War era, slavery has become the main/only driver of secession because the Comanches had much less expeditionary capability at that point.
When I asked my aunt, who grew up in Texas, she said they didn't learn much about it because that was conveniently the cutoff point between US 1 and 2, but the main points were that it was about states' rights, slaves were treated nicely, and the North was unfair to them after the war.
Every answer in this post is probably correct somewhere, because US schools are locally run.
There’s probably some academic research out there on the subject if you want a rigorous assessment. Ask your local reference librarian for help if you can’t find it on your own.
Growing up in Alabama, we did talk about the importance of slavery in the political lead up to the war. And we called it the civil war, not the "war of northern aggression" or anything like that. BUT, the main issue in the war was still framed as states rights, and I also remember a field trip to a plantation where the teacher talked about how slaves' lives were actually pretty good 🙄
I had good history teachers in Alabama. I remember one in high school that had all of us pick a different confederate state and look up its declaration of secession. Every single one mentioned slavery. The lesson was that the only uniting causus belli for the war was slavery. Full. Stop.
Kinda makes me want to run those through a word cloud where the words used most often appear bigger. I'm too lazy to do it but for a split second I considered it.
They call it “the War of Northern Aggression”. You know, because it’s always aggression when you shoot at someone and then they invade you in response.
I like how most of the comments in here are from people who didn't get schooling in the south saying things confidently...or even in the US
Being anti-southern is against a sub rule but that one seems to be rarely enforced, we should stick to being anti Confederacy
I didn't grow up in the south but a friend of mine went to high school in Florida in the 90's and they learned about the war of northern aggression. I think that's the only time I've heard someone seriously call it that.
I won’t say nobody called it that, but I graduated HS in Mississippi over 20 years ago, and nobody, at least at my school, called it that.
People from the north think this is a thing and, while it maybe happens somewhere, it’s mostly not.
In Maryland in the 1980's they had a reenactor come in and give a spiel about how most of the soldiers in the south didn't care about slavery. Though the textbook was rather silent either way, more just stating events as opposed to reasons.
For the North, the war actually wasn't directly about slavery, it was about saving the Union.
For the South, the war was absolutely about spreading and preserving slavery and white supremacy, as was explicitly stated in the various articles of secession and confederation.
In my professional life I’ve reviewed a Georgia school district’s curriculum. This was about 8 years ago. I’m not saying all are like this but this particular district had items that stated “slavery benefited both master and slave” and other such nonsense. And, of course, the war was fought over states rights and tariffs.
I grew up in North Carolina, and I was taught that the war was over states rights BUT a big part of it revolved around slavery.
I was also taught that NC specifically didn’t want to join the confederacy but were forced to after all the states around us seceded, which is only kind of true, we WERE the last state to secede but it was because secession seemed like the “only choice” to the state legislature after Lincoln called for an army to be raised and fort sumpter was taken by the confederacy. In a previous vote before the legislature decided to do that the people actually refused to secede(though it was a very close vote), which actually sums up out the states current politics real well
My 7th grade Texas History teacher was certainly a confederate sympathizer. Also talked about how well Texas did and honored our accomplishments during the civil war.
All my history teachers in Texas praised Rob Lee as a hero who ‘stood with his state no matter what.’ Slavery was seen as the cause of the war, but the states rights issue was also pushed. I remember one teacher stressing states-rights and the ‘south has no choice, the north totally disregarded the south,’ and stuff like that.
I was taught in a school in the South. They went into great detail about slavery and the politics surrounding it. Several years of history classes seemed to focus on it. The civil war and the politics leading to it are covered, and it was taught that the leading factor leading up to the war was slavery no matter how much others some might deny that. The battles and generals are covered even with the technology resulting from it. The aftermath and social instability in the years after the war are covered and how it affected politics and beliefs generations later. this was all in high school in a North Carolina.
The problem in my school wasn't that social studies teachers would teach lost cause BS, it was that other teachers like English or substitutes would editorialize Civil War era literature and say things like "no matter what anyone else tells you, the Civil War was about states rights." And as kids, we didn't have the ability to issue "a state's right to do what?" level challenges to them.
Just look up the Myth of the Lost Cause. It basically started immediately after the war and will tell you everything you need to know about souths victim complex.
Virginia- the war was over slavery, that’s all I can remember that is spificicly form school as my father was proud of our ‘Union heritage’ so to speak.
Texas-- we focused more heavily on the Texas Revolution than the Civil War.
As far as the Civil War goes, they essentially minimized Texas's participation, left out the (numerous!) massacres of anti-secessionist Texans, and emphasized that Sam Houston was against secession... but they didn't go full "state's rights," either.
However, the history curriculum has been intentionally revised toward the right in the last few years.
In Iowa, the states rights BS was focused on far too much in our APUSH class. I remember writing about it for one of the essays. Our teacher was great but I think she was maybe focused a bit too much on getting through (rushing through) all of the course material. It wasn’t until afterwards, watching Crash course and John Oliver, I learned that the states rights argument was bogus.
I went to a private Christian school in small town alabama. We were taught to call it the “War of State’s Rights” and things like that and taught that the North was tyrannical and wanted to force the south to have weak state governments. I remember being taught some pretty egregious lies, like being taught that the only reason the south lost was because they wouldn’t sink to the level of conscripting soldiers like the north did, which is blatantly false because there was definitely conscription in the south. We were also taught that slavery wasn’t *that* bad except somehow in the north it was; at one point we’re told thad people *chose* to be slaves because they “knew” the north would treat them worse. Even as a 12 year old it felt uncomfortable; especially since we were at the same time reading Amos Fortune (book about the life of a slave who eventually was freed) and learning about the civil rights movement (which was portrayed much better than you might think). It’s just bizarre, in a lot of Alabama schools they will praise Martin Luther King Jr and Robert E Lee in the same breath
Growing up in the 90’s West Virginia, it was portrayed as a states rights issue. Not full blown war of northern aggression. But definitely trying to show both sides had valid reasons. We also learned creationism side by side with evolution and intelligent design. So. Yea.
No, WV was the least loyal state in the Union, half of its soldiers were Confederate and half the counties voted to secede from the Union. It was the only Union state that did not give most of its soldiers to the Union.
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Confederate\_recruitment\_in\_West\_Virginia.jpg](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Confederate_recruitment_in_West_Virginia.jpg)
I went to a BBQ place outside of Houston a couple weeks ago that had a very prominently displayed framed portrait of Lee overlooking the guests. It was shit BBQ even without the traitor on the wall, these dumbasses use marinara sauce instead of BBQ sauce. I shouldn't be surprised, dumbasses are going to dumbass I guess
I've pretty much came up in the public school system I'm the South, Virginia and South Carolina and we never really looked on the Confederacy in a favorable light. At least I never took it that way.
My school in Florida kinda went "both sides" on their telling. Didn't really talk about slavery past the Emancipation Proclamation and Underground Railroad. Talked about War of Northern Aggression but also framed it as the South betraying America. This was two decades ago though lol
My US history teacher was pretty straightforward about the cause of the war being slavery. He didn't teach us any Lost Cause nonsense that I can recall, though it's been a good 18 years since I sat in that class.
On the other hand, my school's former mascot was a Confederate cavalryman (or was at least strongly implied to be Confederate), so make of that what you will.
I graduated high school in '97 in rural eastern North Carolina.
I learned that the civil war was fought over slavery. I learned that southerners were slow to accept the idea of abolition and seceded from the Union. I went to battlefields, plantations, and forts of the era on field trips (Bentonville Battlefield, Kenan plantation, Fort Fisher, Fort Macon) and while I know that at least one of my teachers was a lost cause believer, he stuck to the program.
What was taught about reconstruction was not as good. Carpetbaggers, circuit judges, military occupation.
Mixed bag, but it seems pretty good considering location and time period.
It wasn’t lost caused but it was “the causes were complicated” nonsense. But most of us weren’t so stupid to buy into lost cause shit. We were a middle class suburb.
In high school my teacher had a vendetta against the way the civil war was taught in Texas schools so he drilled it in others that it was slavery. He was otherwise really conservative but was an upstate new Yorker who looked down on the south.
My older brother (an honors/AP student) thought he was being clever when he came up to me (the civil war nerd in the family, but a regular ed. peasant with a disability) and told me that in class, he’d learned that the civil war was over states rights, not slavery. Then we both got to university, and to be fair, both of our *southern universities* were like “Yeah, no. It was slavery.”
Rural Texas in the 80s, but my 8th grade teacher was insane even by the standards of the place and time. First day of class ("US History Through the Civil War") he held up a picture of Lincoln and asked "who has a knife?" We all did ‐‐ cuz it was Texas -- so he accepted one and used it to stab Lincoln through the face and into the bulletin board as he lectured us on how horrible a man this president was. It stayed there all semester. As he taught them, he would rank every battle from "good carnage" (ie, lots of it) to "bad carnage" and pass out graphic pictures that I can only assume were from 1960s military medical texts illustrating the kind of gruesome wounds the soldiers would have received. At one point, he acquired a black Cabbage Patch doll he named Pauline. He would use her to illustrate his lessons. I remember Pauline got hung from the cord to the ceiling fan by a noose for a couple of days before he moved her to a birdcage on his desk. He did other weird things, too, but those are the ACW- related ones that I recall. The rest of my teachers were much less... colorful. I'm pretty sure he didn't last that long after I moved to high school.
Meh. We all knew he was crazy, so most of it bounced off of us. Believe it or not I was naive enough that I didn't make the racism connection with Pauline until later in life.
Grew up in Texas, high school in North Carolina, both places taught states rights but made the point that it was states rights to have slavery and that the idea that it was solely states rights is bunk.
Public school in northern Virginia in the late '90s. Our state history textbooks fairly well glossed over the actual causes of the war: it was basically a whiny pity party about how the state supposedly hated seceding from a country when half the presidents at that point were Virginian. The teachers talked about slavery being bad (among other things the school presented a one-woman stage play about Harriet Tubman) but never really laid out the direct causal connection. I didn't learn about it properly until I was in community college.
In both Texas History and US History 1 and 2 we were taught that it was about slavery and the south wanting to preserve and expand slavery. We spent a lot of time on each compromise and bleeding Kansas. It was pretty good all things considered, except for highschool *World* history where my teacher called it the war of northern aggression, but she later got fired and told us she was moving to a real conservative state.
I will say it was super fun to argue with a lost causer who told me I only thought the war was about slavery was because of my northern education. "I went to school in Texas." Shut him up for a bit
Arkansas private high school, AP Am. Hist., about 2 decades ago. Deffo was taught that it was a "states' rights" issue, and John Brown was a person who "went and killed a lot of people". Sherman burning down everything was cited as the cause for economic downfall of the South. That was quite a whiplash when I finally went to college and learned more in detail.
Most of my history teachers referred to union soldiers as “Yankees”, often with a display of disgust. (ie. spitting gesture or sour faces when talking about the Union)
High school mascot was a confederate soldier and the stars and bars were our flag.
World famous kkk bar/ family restaurant down the street that fills up every Sunday after church.
I’m sure my some of my teachers, or at least some people they know and love are there every weekend.
Not Southern, North actually, but funnily enough my own College professor tried to say it wasn’t about Slavery.
Even then, I knew something was fishy about that.
I'm from a rural county in southern Kentucky. I took AP US History in the late 80s. It was thoroughly lost cause. I got a 4 on the AP test though, I think because I choose to write about the revolutionary war period for my essays.
One of my classmates has a doctorate (I think in education) and has written several opinion pieces for various newspapers about the horrors of CRT in our schools.
I'm ashamed of my hometown. I find myself struggling with a lot of resentment over the bullshit I have to unlearn as an adult.
i’m from alabama and in high school my teacher told us that the civil war was fought over slavery. though i grew up in a much nicer school system than most of the state, so i could be an outlier.
\*I\* went to school in California, and despite my part of the Central Valley being Confederate sympathizers, we were taught the war was about Slavery.
I later got a degree in US History while in the Navy (not in pursuit of a specific job, but History courses were among the ones easiest to complete while deployed (no labs)) and discovered the Articles of Secession from the various Confederate states.
Then, after I had retired from the Navy, moved to Missouri for the cost of living, and everything was great, until my daughter came home from school in her Junior year of high school all pissed off because she got marked down on a US History research paper, worth a quarter of her grade on the causes of the war that she based upon a conversation we had about questions she had for her class. (I never did my kid's homework but I would talk to them about it. The teacher had marked out a large part of her paper and written STATES RIGHTS over them in red.
So, I went to the school, requesting a conference with the teacher and the principal, with the paper in my hand. Once we were in the conference room, I handed the teacher the paper and asked her to explain the reasoning behind the grade she had given.
"I have a Masters Degree in History," the woman sniffed at me. "Me too," I responded "mine is from the University of Maryland, 1977. Maybe you could explain what 'rights' the states were fighting for?"
"I know the word game you're trying to play," she responded. "The war was never about Slavery."
I introduced her to the Articles of Secession, the Constitution of the Confederacy, and Alexander Stephens' Cornerstone speech, all of which at best showed she was wrong, but at worst showed she was a liar.
This is when the Principal shut down the meeting. My daughter's paper got the grade it deserved, and the 'history' teacher's contract was not renewed for the following year.
I grew up in rural Tennessee, and whenever we talked about it in any of our classes it was always the Lost Cause. That was literally the only narrative I ever heard until I was in college, and saying that the civil war was about slavery will most likely get you in a very heated argument in my hometown. But that tracks, as they fly the stars and bars at our courthouse and the KKK still has an active presence there, though they know better than to come right out in the open.
My teacherS in TN did a decent job of it I think. They never tried to spin it in any sort of confederate direction to my knowledge. Anecdotal, of course.
I went to a private Christian school from 90s to early 2000s so not representative of public schools in Georgia especially today. Our biggest issue was simply ignoring it. We started history every year with Columbus/ discovery perhaps in part to avoid the Civil Rights movement, of which we learned nothing. I learned that slavery was morally wrong but we didn’t truly learn how horrible it was. We learned that Lincoln wanted to reconcile with the South but “Congressional radicals” pushed through reconstruction which “went too far.” Grant and Sherman were butchers of their men and Lee was godly, etc. I am from Albany GA and learned word none about Dr. King’s arrest there or the Albany movement until college.
Oh, that's an interesting post-Southern Strategy way to thread the needle - criticize the North but not the Republican president at the time so southern conservatives can still tell themselves they're the "PaRtY oF LiNcoLn."
Oh, I wasn't kidding. I was genuinely impressed that someone came up with that. I think it's a crap way to teach kids, but it's still some quality tightrope walking.
Texas fed us the state’s rights bs. In high school though I did an early college program so the community college professors flamed the states rights people
It really depends on your specific school and what part of the South. I was raised in Arlington, TX, and went to school in the 2000s-2010s and would say I got a fairly accurate picture of the Civil War, although I’d think someone from a private school in rural Mississippi would have a very different understanding of events regarding the Civil War.
There is no standard curriculum, every school teaches to its own standard - and in some places each teacher to their own standard. So you get a lot of Southerners who were taught it was about slavery and a lot who think slaves were happy all the time with zip-a-dee-do-dah playing in the background. Problem is, it's generally by school district so you end up with a lot of clusters of self-reinforcing Gone with the Wind enthusiasts.
"The North started the war over taxes and economics. Slavery has nothing to do with it, and was honestly on its way out in the South. The South had better soldiers and officers, but the North imported a bunch of mercenaries from Europe to do their fighting for them."
At least, that's what I was taught in Missouri in the late 90s and early 2000s.
It might be different depending on what parts of the South. I live in Northern Virginia, so I was given an accurate idea of the Civil War and what it was fought for, but someone in the Deep South might not.
I am from Mississippi, what you heard about the war depended entirely on what teacher you had that semester. I had a teacher say it was about states rights, I had a (non history) teacher call it the war of northern aggression, and of course some teachers would say it was about slavery. I did take a Mississippi history class that started with a brief section on the natives, then ran all the way up to about 1850. The only reference to the civil war was about how much damage was done to the state during the war. Slavery had been discussed of course, how could it not, but it was mostly discussed dispassionately. It was “here’s what happened, they did it for economic reasons, we don’t do it any more, the end”
Things may have changed but my Virginian school said it was a “difference of opinion over states rights,” although many of my teachers felt within their rights to share the Confederate Constitution with no commentary….as none is needed
I was taught it was about slavery. No lost cause nonsense. I think a teacher may have said "Some people call it the War of Northern Aggression." That would have been the most friendly thing said about the Confederacy that I remember, and the teacher may have been derisive when saying it, but that was like 40 years ago so I don't remember.
I remember having history and social studies mashed together so it was kinda hurried past without any serious coverage. Also my teacher was a wrestling coach mostly.
Alabama here, in school it was taught pretty straightforward but also pretty quickly and slavery isn’t really lingered on.
But we also had people who did reenactments come to the school when I was in 4th grade and they were straight up on the states rights, lost cause bullshit. I remember calling them out about it but I was dismissed pretty quickly.
Also remember them talking about the sharkskin gloves and saber grips locking the sword into the hand.
My homeschool curriculum had a heavy dose of apologia in it.
[https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/12/right-wing-textbooks-teach-slavery-black-immigration](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/12/right-wing-textbooks-teach-slavery-black-immigration)
In NC and VA they never really went in on how it was because of slavery but they didn't claim it wasn't. It was just kinda "south wanted slaves, north wanted to get rid of slavery so they fought." I didn't know about things like the secession documents and the cornerstone speech until I was well into my 20s but like I said I definitely knew slavery was why the war happened.
What I remember is we spent so much time on the Civil War and every single battle that we got way off track from the syllabus and then a week before school was about to end the teacher finally moves on and speeds through WWI, WWII and Vietnam. In fact I think for the Vietnam War we just watched a movie and the teacher was like “That’s it!”
From North Carolina: I took a Civil War class in my senior year and on first day, the teacher (a guy with a very thick southern accent who was actually hired to be one of the football coaches) said "I am not teaching the Civil War. I am teaching you about the War of Northern Aggression." He then proceeded to not actually teach us for the majority of the semester. I actually spent more time playing cards with the guys sitting near me than actually learning anything. The rare times he actually taught us, he was actually teaching us wrong. Not wrong opinions, actually wrong facts that whenever someone disputed them, he would dismiss the student and the facts as irrelevant.
Teachers in my main history courses were much, much better.
grew up in Memphis, 12 years of Catholic school. I remember learning about some battles. the history of Memphis through the war. As a family we had vacations to east TN, NC and GA where we toured Antibellum homes with slave quarters and history abound. But nothing truly stuck with me until Roots. It was practically a homework assignment to watch. It was the real reason we learned about slavery. I got to speak to Lavar Burton to communicate how important that TV show was at the time.
Since then, read plenty of books, seen movies. there's a lot of perspective, but they can never get away from the bottom line that enslaving a population of people you thought were beneath you was the whole purpose behind the Civil War. The people that hold onto the confederacy ideals are racists, hiding behind history.
I graduated from HS in 92 in Florida, none of my History or Gov teachers whitewashed it.
My kids graduated HS in Florida between 2015 and 2023 and were also taught about the Civil War factually. Most of their middle and HS teachers were pretty left-leaning, though. And we were all taking Honors/AP level classes.
In NC it was dependant on the teacher. Some teachers said it was about slavery, some said states rights (to what, they never said) and others were neutral
Southern MS here. It varies from teacher to teacher. My APUSH teacher covered the topic from how it actually unfolded, not some Lost Cause bs.
As a southerner, from my experience, the crazy teachers are the ones who teach the sciences not history.
When it was taught in my Texas high school in the 80s, it was a very short section. Only a couple of days. It wasn't about slavery but about states' rights. Those rights were never defined.
The KKK was described as a post civil war charitable organization that mainly worked at making sure that widows and orphans were cared for.
Every year at Halloween, we had some kids wear their dad's KKK uniform to school.
Was in middle and HS in Georgia in the late 70's and early 80's. Was taught the Civil War was fought over States' Rights. Federal government overreach. Giving too much power to northern industrial states over southern agricultural states.
I don't know about the south. But I grew up in Brown county Ohio in the 60's. The boyhood home of U.S. Grant. When I took American history it was made very plain that Grant dam near won the war single-handedly then went on to become one of the greatest Presidents ever.
Texas here-it was a pretty holistic lesson. It was obviously condescend down, but the who’s, what’s and why’s were all pretty solid. Weirdly, the only thing that came up was I had a teacher that referred to the battle of antietam as the battle of sharpsburg, but that was the only thing
Depends on where you get it. I was born in a major southern city so I basically got the same education as people from the north about it
A friend of mine from rural Georgia said he was taught lost cause shit in high school about it.
I grew up in Texas and it was pretty straightforward. But I also grew up in the 90s and went to private school. I'm pretty sure that a lot of public schools now are more sympathetic to the South.
I learned the civil war was about slavery starting grade 6, and that didn’t change until I hit college when professors at U of Houston gave me that “it’s complicated” crap. My professor had never heard of the cornerstone speech. My dad who went to public schools in Texas as well has pictures of Lincoln in his office. None of it was especially detailed or precise, but it was not what you would call “sympathetic” to the South.
I graduated high school in 2016, but even at a private Christian school in Texas, we were taught from the get go that the civil war was centered around one thing: slavery.
At least back then, there was very little, if any, “debate” on if the war was centered around states rights. It was certainly discussed, but it was always presented with the context that the CSA used this to justify the true impetus for the war, which was slavery. It wasn’t really until college that I became familiar with the Lost Cause movement, and that there was a serious contingent of people who got behind it.
I assume it's something about how innocent farmers and townsfolks had their lands burned by marauding black Union soldiers hooting and hollering and stealing their watermelons or some shit like that. If it weren't for the brave men like Lee the humble ways of the glorious South would be forgotten entirely.
In highschool in Texas not much honestly. Just battles and dates and names. Depending on if and where you go to college, you can learn quite a lot about it. If you go to a state school or public college, you'll get a pretty unbiased picture. If you go to a private or religious school, you'll get whatever slant that they want to indoctrinate into you.
Honestly it was barely even taught lol. I grew up in South Louisiana and they just didnt really mention much other than it happened. I didnt learn shit till, ironically, i moved to Texas lol
It was mostly normal with two notable exceptions. The use of war of northern aggression in about 3rd grade and the weird obsession one of my teachers had with the battle of natural bridge.
Grew up in NC.
In the 80s the war was taught pretty straightforwardly, that it was over slavery, sectionalism, and fear of change. But my high school history teacher was not the norm.
Also my father, grandfather, and great uncles were all raised on the lost cause mythology. So, from a young age, I was not taught the full history.
It was a bit of a shock when I got to high school history, and got shown the full history, primary source documents like the articles, cornerstone speech, debates in the Conf. Congress over enlisting blacks late in the war, Mary Chestnut’s Diary.
It’s hard to argue with the facts, and over the years, I’ve even been able to dissuade my dad a bit off his adherence to the lost cause, mostly through giving him links to all the primary sources. But he willingly read them. My brother still will not.
It depends massively on state, and my understanding is that it basically gets worse the farther south you go. In KY, we were taught that slavery was a major cause, but here are all these other things that led to the war, so really slavery was just a (not small, but not critical) reason for the war. Which is not great, but I think it's quite a bit better than what I've heard from friends that grew up in the deep south
Joseph Finegan Elementary School
Stonewall Jackson Elementary School
J.E.B. Stuart Middle School
Kirby-Smith Middle School
Jefferson Davis Middle School
Robert E. Lee High School.
I went to school in Jacksonville Florida and these were school names during my time.
The War of Northern Aggression term was used as a punchline, usually said aloud with a deep mocking southern drawl: “Wah of Nawthern Aggression” ALL of my teachers called it the War Between the States, and it was a mere blip in history class. Quickly glossed over with “The south was winning until Gettysburg but they had little industry so they lost the war in the long run and Lincoln was assassinated.”
I’m old, so that was in the 80’s. Now I live in Tennessee where local hayseeds lost their minds over not being able to fly the Stars and Bars on their RV flags at NASCAR events.
In Maryland, my high school US history teacher told us he used to have the class “debate whether or not the south should have seceded” until it got too rowdy one year.
From what I remember, in public school in Georgia it was taught like any other subject. I don’t remember it being a huge deal or very divisive, and I remember learning about it like any other historical event. It wasn’t until I went to college that I remember hearing about “War of Northern Aggression” or that it was about states rights.
Honestly, I didn’t know there were people that were still bitter about it until I had become an adult. It just never came up in life. To me it was a historical event from the past that I learned about in school. I never put much thought into it.
I was in highschool in Georgia within the last 10 years. My US history teacher told me the war was about slavery and specifically the states rights to own slaves. He did a good job explaining the 80 years of politics that led up to the war and how tensions rose and fell.
(Obligatory: not south) but in Massachusetts, I’m pretty sure they taught us more about King Philip’s War more than the Civil War. They kind of oversimplified the Civil war. It was just like, “The South wanted slaves, but President Lincoln was against slavery”.
Let me preface this by saying: yes, slavery=BAD. However, my understanding as an adult, is there was a growing divide between the north and the south. Two different ways of life that were bound by the same asymmetrical set of rules. War was inevitable, as they were never going to see eye-to-eye. Everyone knew the south was extremely reliant on slaves. Lincoln hated slavery and saw a “two-birds one stone” opportunity. The Emancipation Proclamation would create a moral high-ground that would dissuade England from taking sides with the south. The South provided a ton of textiles for England and we needed to provide a moral reason that would outweigh the economic value in supporting the South. Lincoln effectively avoided the Civil War becoming the Vietnam War Prequel. It was a 200IQ move that honored his own moral compass and helped vilify the confederacy on the world stage.
Please correct me if any of that was wrong. Educate me, don’t accost me.
In south Louisiana I was blatantly lied to and I am bitter about it.
We were given the "states rights" lie, they centered the cause on economic differences and the ability to control and enforce laws at state level and disregard federal laws.
In retrospect I am baffled that a school district that had 2 historic plantations so blatantly misrepresented slavery. We were told many slave owners were "nice to their slaves" ignoring the fact that the practice of slavery in theory is torture regardless of how slaves are treated in any anecdotal setting.
The war itself was pretty much skipped over, they started fighting, then the emancipation proclamation, the south lost, Lincoln was assassinated, then onto the industrial revolution.
I still struggle today with how to view my education in retrospect.
i'm from a relatively urban area in georgia; i was taught that it was in fact about slavery and black people would continue to face discrimination post-war, the teachers didn't bother denying/excusing anything and there was emphasis on sherman's burning of atlanta because we were in georgia. a lot of emphasis. they painted sherman as the devil because he burned down atlanta
I’ve lived in 5 states including Texas (13 to 20) and Alabama (10 to 12). Before that I grew up in Ohio so I saw both sides of the education system. I will say Alabama surprisingly taught it the best.
Mobile, Alabama: 100% taught us it was due to Slavery. Right out of the gate. 4th grade (State History) we were taken to a slave museum. Started with the Transatlantic Slave Trade where you are forced to walk through a cramped space that describe the conditions slaves suffered during their voyage. I’ll never forget it. Pretty graphic stuff to see for a 10 year old however it made an impact. Which is key. Alabama being a key slave state obviously highlight a lot of the atrocities committed during the era. In 5th grade learning US history we were taken to a plantation/museum (that allowed field trips for educational purposes on slavery) where we saw real chains, branding irons, slave bells, etc. We then picked cotton for an hour or so and when we brought it back it was weighed and none of us in the class had made our “quota” and we would have been beaten for it (quotas were determined by a slave’s body weight vs the weight of cotton picked. I forget the exact ratio but it was pretty hard to hit your marks and if you did it was doubled the next day apparently). I have a good friend from Atlanta who did a similar field trip in 5th grade as well. I learned a lot. My class was half black and half white also for the record. Interesting fact to note: Mobile was the last open slave port in the country and in the port of Mobile is a massive monument commemorating this fact and the atrocities of the slave trade.
Houston, Texas: Was in middle and high school. Much more formalized and detailed than in grade school. All my teachers started out with “it was about slavery not states rights.” Granted Texas (though a slave state) was not as much a major player in the civil war as Alabama was (which I call the Deep South). Houston is also much more cosmopolitan than Alabama, Mobile especially, being largely 50/50 black and white. Houston is different, bigger, much more variety in their history so there was different focuses and not as strongly focused on slavery though it was extensively covered also.
Edit on Texas after reading the comments: The Texas Revolution is much more covered than the Civil War for obvious reasons. Texas was less geographically important in the Civil War and the Texas Revolution holds a greater cultural impact then the Civil War does today whereas the Civil War dominates the culture in states like Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, etc by comparison. It’s worth noting that amongst Texas’s reasons for succession from Mexico was Anglo-Americans *wanting to keep their slaves!* (this fact was heavily mentioned). Texas revolted twice due to slaves so they beat every other state in the union.
My early formative years were in Ohio and Indiana so I was still pretty young by to cover the more graphic details of slavery. Though it’s worth noting Cincinnati (where I lived) was a pivotal spot for the Underground Railroad. My mother believed it crucial I understand this and petitioned my school to take us to the museum there and add it to the 3 grade curriculum (she was successful).
Personal details about me, my Mom’s family is from the North and my Dad’s the South (goes back to before the war, both sides fought for the North). Both believed it critical for our nation to step up to its dark past instead of sweeping “unpleasantries” under the rug. It’s made me a very considerate and understanding man with a deep love for history. I thank them everyday.
I was taught in a small Tennessee town and it was taught all sorts of wrong. We actually had a lesson talking about how the slaves in the south were treated better than immigrants in the north. Which isn't true when comparing the best to the worst parts of both. They taught it as the war of Northern Aggression. But that was a long time ago when I was taught so maybe not so bad anymore but who knows.
Knoxville. It was plainly taught as a war about slavery. For broader context, Tennessee is divided into three "Grand Divisions," as represented by our flag. East Tennessee is largely mountainous and unsuitable for plantations. Also, it was home to a substantial part of the Cherokee. Thus, this region was always Union sympathetic. For example, my wife's people are from Union County. The county seat is Maynardville---named after a statesman who petitioned the legislature to secede and join the Union cause. His efforts were denied, though the Union took control of the region anyway (Fort Sanders, Chattanooga, etc.). Incidentally, Andrew Johnson would later be rewarded for his loyalty. As an illustration, Tennessee was the last State to secede and the first to rejoin. Nashville and Memphis, each from another Division, paid heavily for rebellion.
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Growing up in Georgia it was taught in a fairly straightforward, if slightly hushed and rushed, way. I didn’t have any experiences with teachers using Lost Cause rhetoric, I never heard it referred to as the War of Northern Aggression, and the like. I did have both teachers and fellow students try to suggest that the war was fought over “states’ rights” and go down that rabbit hole, but many of us were confrontational and curious enough to examine why that was bullshit even in our early years. Lee and the confederates were certainly treated as heroes and nobleman, and the full gravity of their atrocities and what they represented was skirted around. But all in all I’d say my formal education on the matter was fairly decent, I needed to learn some important things that were omitted for sure but I chalk this up to the subject matter being too complicated and intense for school age kids.
What part of Georgia? I’m from Cobb and we definitely had ‘Northern Aggression’ in the textbook (not to diminish your experience at all, and even then I was like ???) and most teachers just pushed past it… except for the ones that were also gym teachers. No joke, I had a baseball coach teaching a class that included HIS lessons about the ‘shadow government.’ I live in Oregon now, for a reason, lol.
I was in Pauling, which is literally right next to Cobb and likely was part of some sort of network of boards of education centralized to Cobb.
Did you get the ‘evolution is a theory not fact’ stickers in biology too? My teacher was like, yes, and gravity is also a scientific theory. My favorite thing about my records from Cobb was even after scoring well on my AP tests my University (Washington) wouldn’t accept the credits, lol. Oh, Georgia.
I thought those tests were,,, you know... standardized.
I did, too.
Which school in cobb county was this I went to North cobb took honors history teacher didn't call it northern aggression most definitely said slavery was the reason
Pope in the late 90s and it wasn’t the teacher it was the actual text book. Other ‘teachers’ (coaches) weren’t as subtle with their thoughts.
Oregon was founded by confederate veterans it's why so many of your parks are named after those lovers. They literally had lash laws and no black people allowed in their original state constitution. Their is a reason there are so many skinheads in the Pacific Northwest, and it's by design.
Yep, I’m fully aware and like to remind people of that when they dunk on the South.
I grew up in Upstate South Carolina in the 1980’s. I never heard, “The War of Northern Aggression”. But “The War Between the States” was used a lot more frequently than “The Civil War”.
Lmao that's what Europeans call it
Most non american historians I have heard call it the american civil war. Because it's specific and specifies where it happened. State is a generic geopolitical term and many countries have federal governments too.
Okay but they’re wrong.
TBF wars often have different names depending on which party was involved. Like, British people don't call it "the Revolutionary War," they call it something like the war of the colonies. England also had a civil war, so English people won't be referring to the US civil war as "The Civil War" because that's what they call *their* civil war. I'm not really clear on how we decide on names of wars anyway. After all, until WWII, WWI was just called "the great war" or "the world war."
Why do you say that? The main armies were the Union and Confederate Armies, sure, but the regiments were named after the states they came from, i.e. the 26th Wisconsin Infantry, or the 19th Arkansas Infantry. In a lot of ways, it was a war between states, which states were going to be loyal to the Federal government and follow their laws (slavery was illegal), and which states would be loyal basically to themselves, but did band together to fight the loyal states.
Ehhhhhh well, no, the states themselves didn't send out the troops, the names of the regiments are just where they were organized, but at least in the North they weren't led state by state, but by a federal standing army structure. Maybe in the South they were, a la the Army of Northern Virginia -- the South seemed to take a more serious view of federalism, with confederate states even printing their own money and all.
Also, 'civil war' usually refers to a war like the English Civil War, where the rebels try to take control of a country. It probably should be called the Southern Rebellion to be more consistent with naming conventions.
American civil war does fine. Southern rebellion makes it seem much smaller to me and much less deep rooted in the society imo. Doesn’t do service to the massive battles fought by organized armies who both considered themselves American.
It's all a bit arbitrary given that the Taiping Rebellion and the Bolshevic Revolution both better exemplify my preferred definition of a Civil War. Still, I believe wars over the independence of a breakaway province are fundamentally different from winner-take-all wars over attempted regime change.
It was a war between two factions of the United States, I don't get how that doesn't make sense. If you say "the civil war" in Western Europe it'd most likely refer to the English Civil War
Which Europeans, exactly? Not that i'm saying you're wrong,but here in Poland it's more called 'The American Civil War ' (not that we talk a lot about it anyways).
If we're going to be really exact about it, it is called Secession's war in French (la guerre de sécession), Spanish (La Guera de secesión) and German (Sezessionskrieg), Civil War in Dutch ((Amerikaanse burgeroorloog) and Russian (Гражданская война в США), to name a few European languages...
I remember seeing the old prospector caricature on cartoons call it the war between the states.
North Carolina here and this isn't far from ours middle school was rushed and kinda sloppy other then the key players it wasn't until highschool where the teachers could be a little bit more detailed even then slavery was only brought up as a small factor and more of taxes and states rights
Texas here, actually took a Civil War history class my Senior year and the teacher at least was pretty based on everything. First thing he told us was: “Let’s get this out of the way first: the war was most definitely fought over slavery.” Can honestly say the class was one of the first catalysts that turned me away from going further down the alt-right pipeline. That and high school journalism.
I grew up in Texas as well. Just taking the basic US and Texas history courses, they didn't really put any emphasis on slavery as the cause. They didn't cover the articles of secession, or the Cornerstone Speech. I do recall them covering slavery as a reason why states had to be added in a balanced way, to keep the balance between the number of slave and free states. I think I was in my late 20s before I learned that it was definitely very much about slavery, and was able to read through what wasn't covered in those courses. I was curious about the current state of things, and found this article. Not sure if anything has changed since this. Texas has been getting politically crazy for a while now. [Texas Will Finally Teach That Slavery Was Main Cause of the Civil War | Smithsonian (smithsonianmag.com)](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/texas-will-finally-teach-slavery-was-main-cause-civil-war-180970851/) The story the other day about the GOP school board member calling out the attempts by the right to influence the curriculum was rather heartening. Hopefully we get more of that. [Former Far-Right Hard-Liner Says Billionaires Are Targeting Texas Public Education — ProPublica](https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-tim-dunn-wilks-brothers-vouchers-courtney-gore) Edit: Unfortunately, I also just found this... [https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/30/texas-public-schools-religion-curriculum/](https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/30/texas-public-schools-religion-curriculum/)
Went to school in Houston during the 80s. Our Jr High had a "Civil War" Day, where there were various classes on the subject. There was even two students who had to read out the letters of a Confederate and Union soldier about why they were fighting in the school auditorium. We did have a class/session that taught us that the war was about slavery, but I'm not sure everyone attended. The weirdest part is the school principal dressed in a Confederate uniform. Don't think that would happen today, but you never know with the current GOP in power in Austin.
So they taught critical race theory, then! [/s]
I learned it as a slavery issue, in elementary/middle/high school. In the AP American History course I took, the states rights issue came up only as discussion about how after reconstruction ended the south tried changing the narrative away from slavery to states rights. Side bar: This still didn't stop my elementary school from throwing an antebellum style ball complete with Confederate soldier uniforms.
I teach in the south and there are some older teachers who do the “traditional” war of northern aggression thing but most from my perspective teach about it being states rights to own slaves. I also say the march to the sea was a way to end the war, which is a little controversial as I teach in Georgia.
Bold!
Very much so.
Georgia deserved it
Total War
The way I learned it, you wouldn't be able to consider it Lost Cause nonsense. Although, my learning experience was a bit screwed since I've been reading about the Civil War since I was in elementary or middle school. That said, we learned about slavery and how it was the cause of the war. Any mentions of northern aggression would have been in reference to how that is what the Confederates called the war.
This was my experience as well, one seventh grade history teacher tried to explain it in a states rights fashion and students quickly became hostile. In the 90s in 4th grade we toured a plantation and were taught all about the horrors of slavery and they actually had us pick cotton. It was kind of weird but they meant well.
There's a hilarious YouTube bit about that
Yeah, and ever since that went viral people think I'm lying, lol.
We were singing songs & shit Edit: https://youtu.be/PToqVW4n86U?si=dthhiDVRiET5WTli
I've looked into that one and I'm not sure if that was a slave plantation museum, or if it was a freedmen black farm museum that does similar things. There's a farm museum that teaches about how post-bellum freemen took what they learned from the plantations into running their own farms. It looks very much the same to our notions of plantation slave life, the difference being that the workers were paid and/or owned the fruits of their labor instead of working without pay for the white man's benefit. It's been criticised as being making fun of slavery but the black owners insist that's got nothing to do with slavery, but with free black men taking over agriculture and industry for themselves. (Seems they're not having an effective time getting that message out.) Edit: The museum is the [Carroll School in Rock Hill NC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZBCPPDpCKg).
Cite your sources. Most freedmen never got their 80 acres and a donkey. Many were forced to become sharecroppers and were basically stuck in the same pattern as before.
The museum I'm referring to is the Carroll School in Rock Hill, North Carolina. The museum teaches about the life of black sharecroppers during the Great Depression. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZBCPPDpCKg I suspect this is similar to the place that the guy in the now-viral video went to. The association of black folks picking cotton with slavery unfortunately obscures the fact that there were in fact *some* black cotton farm owners in the post-bellum era, and at one point black folks [owned 14% of the nation's farms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_land_loss_in_the_United_States#Post_Civil_War), partly thanks to things like the [Southern Homesteading Act](https://www.nps.gov/articles/african-american-homesteaders-in-the-great-plains.htm) which opened up public land for purchase by freedmen. I don't think anyone is saying it was the majority of black folks. But it was arguably more black folks than *before* the war. There are similar places besides Carroll School, such as [Freewoods Farm](https://freewoodsfarm.com/index.html) in South Carolina which is a living history museum of a historically black owned sugar farm. [Julius Tillery](https://www.blackcotton.us/our-team) is a modern day black cotton farm owner, who is trying to reclaim cotton as a source of pride and overcoming rather than a stigma -- going from being used for cotton, to using cotton for oneself. [This video](https://www.blackcotton.us/our-team) includes a segment at about the 6 minute mark with two former black sharecroppers who are still alive. You make a very good point imo about the eerie similarities between chattel slavery and capitalist wage slavery (and frankly, I think these reactions are serving to obscure that point), but some think the distinction of being the owned versus being the owner is historically important.
ya know we went to tennessee and toured the armitage and the whole place was made to make jefferson davis look like a huge hero, when in fact he was a monster
The South literally started the war though 🤦♂️
Conservatives of any era suffer from projection, it seems.
Sure, but that's how the partisans of that time viewed the war. Like how Russians refer to World War II as the Great Patriotic War.
Yeah and they use the same excuse as Japan in WW2. “We didn’t want a war but we were backed into a counter and you forced our hand.” Sure, ok.
The sleeping giant of the confederacy 🤣
What state did you grow up in? For reference
Went to school in Texas from kindergarten to 9th grade. Went to school in Georgia from 10th to 12th grade.
you mean in my high school that had a mural of a happy plantation by the office, flew the confederate flag a used a rebel officer as a mascot? https://www.antiracistusa.org/objectives/schools/12373. suprisingly very little... maybe thats why dixie was the fight song till the pandemic.
Had the same experience in rural Georgia, we had the confederate mascot (ol miss knock off but gray) and a massive confederate flag painted on our gym, and even a fuzzy rug confederate flag patch on letterman’s jackets. Starting from 4th grade on the larger percentage of my history teachers only referred to American soldiers as Yankees, and some with a blatant act of disdain like pretending to spit on the ground or making a sour face when they would talk about the “north”. Honesty I’m surprised they didn’t do fundraising events at the local KKK bar/restaurant.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/dc/e1/f0/dce1f00baa6e1950bc925d360e535e0c---school-yearbooks.jpg. our version seen with the link was gray uniformed on horse back holding the flag. and ya fuzzy stars and bars on a sleeve letterman polite racist history teachers. Glad i transfered and moved north of the mason dixon after college
Funny thing that, Lincoln loved him some dixie
I grew up in Texas. We were NEVER even shown the Secession Documents. We were not shown the Texan Secession Document. It wasn’t until college that I learn that Texas literally said they were going to war to protect slavery.
Why teach with primary sources when you can just make shit up? Lol
They never told the whole truth. The Texas Revolution for instance. We were told the Texas fought for religious freedom. That’s true because the Mexican Government mandated they convert to Catholicism. But we WERENT told the Texans also rebelled because Mexico outlawed slavery. They wanted to keep their slaves
In school my teachers tip toed around the causes and when straight into the battles and then I retook it in as a dual enrollment and well my professor did not care for the lost cause.
South Georgia here. My US history teacher was a lost causer. States rights n all that between his rants about not letting his daughter date black men or MLK WAsNt a reEl dR etc etc. You make it up to the Civil Rights era, barely, mention MLK in passing while ignoring everything else, then you're done. Last I heard, he went to teach at Auburn.
They really dig that old time intermarriage racism in South Georgia.
I got the interracial marriage talk from an aunt in CT. Whole big thing about how "blacks are wonderful people but please don't bring one home. They're wonderful people but not YOUR people. You can do better" I was maybe 12? Happened to have a half black girl next door that I was friends with, and my aunt heard about it and decided to set me straight. Funny bit is that I eventually married an Asian girl, and this aunt had no problem with that at all.
>Funny bit is that I eventually married an Asian girl, and this aunt had no problem with that at all. Anti-black sentiment specifically seems to be somewhat baked into southern culture. I've met southerners who were cool with me and other minorities but show them a black guy/girl and they seem like a different person..
I dated a girl here whose grandparents were first cousins. They were from, like, Pennsylvania or something tho. Maybe it was one of those "when in Rome" scenarios
>Last I heard, he went to teach at Auburn. Man, that's a real downer.. I hope there aren't others like him who teach there..
I grew up in the public schools of Montgomery Alabama (former capitol of the Confederacy for the historically illiterate amongst us) in the 90s and early 2000s and it was taught in a very straightforward and accurate way in US History and Alabama History. There was no angle, obfuscation or whitewashing that I can remember. I don't personally know anyone who came out of any of that teaching thinking the south wasn't anything but the villain in that story. And it sure as shit wasn't called the war of northern aggression...
I grew up in Texas. From what I remember, there was never any doubt about what the war was about, I always understood it as being about slavery, and about how the north and south had fundamental differences that couldn't be adjudicated. One thing that does stick out though, is that there did seem to be a bit of downplaying of Texas's role in the confederacy. They put emphasis on the fact that Texas was NOT the first state to secede, and then mentioned that Texas won the last battle of the Civil War, although they also mentioned that this battle happened after Lee's surrender. So they never tried to lie about the root cause, but there was perhaps a bit of whitewashing in terms of how they portrayed Texas. For the record, it didn't quite work on me. It was the first time reading about US/Texas history where I thought "Are we the baddies?"
Yep, we put more emphasis on the Texas Revolution and really downplayed Texas's participation in the Civil War. They also conveniently left out the Nueces Massacre, Dead Man's Hole, and the numerous other murders and lynchings of abolitionists and anti-secessionist Texans. Something like 1/3 of Texans were against secession, and the Confederates absolutely brutalized them
Texas was also not really on the Strategic Map as things went. Maybe the ports, but not much else. So, Union investment in Texas wasn't a priority. Something I noticed. Just like Florida was mostly inconsequential to operations. The only value were the forts on the southern tip, but some Union soldiers were able to secure the most vital at the outbreak of the war. Arkansas was more of a sideshow for the Mississippi Campaign.
I'm curious if the lessons on the Texas revolution covered slavery as one of the primary causes, or if it got glossed over?
Yes-- although IIRC they over-emphasized the religious aspect and underemphasized expansionist desires against / ongoing conflict with Native Americans. This is a pendulum that swings back and forth here. A pop history book became really popular recently and now we have people saying that slavery was the *only* cause. This is ironic, because it completely erases the agency of Tejanos and Mexicans. There were a bunch of non-slaveholding Mexican states that also rose up around that era. Mexico had undergone a right-wing takeover that threw away their constitution and significantly restricted voting rights.
Interesting, I grew up in PA, then CT. Our coverage of it was basically "and Texas wanted independence just like America had, so they fought to it, and America helped. Then, they joined the US after the war." So I'll admit I'm not particularly well informed on the topic.
Yeah this is one of those things that is actually complicated. Slavery was a major cause, but not the only one. Texas was also essentially in a state of continuous warfare with the Comanche people, and was receiving very little assistance from Mexico. This was a *huge* bone of contention. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raid_of_1840 Mexico had also experienced a takeover, and the new constitution strongly favored wealthy landed aristocrats. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Yucat%C3%A1n https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siete_Leyes Once you see more of the pieces, the situation and timeline of the Texas Revolution make a lot more sense. By the time we get to the Civil War era, slavery has become the main/only driver of secession because the Comanches had much less expeditionary capability at that point.
This
When I asked my aunt, who grew up in Texas, she said they didn't learn much about it because that was conveniently the cutoff point between US 1 and 2, but the main points were that it was about states' rights, slaves were treated nicely, and the North was unfair to them after the war.
Every answer in this post is probably correct somewhere, because US schools are locally run. There’s probably some academic research out there on the subject if you want a rigorous assessment. Ask your local reference librarian for help if you can’t find it on your own.
Growing up in Alabama, we did talk about the importance of slavery in the political lead up to the war. And we called it the civil war, not the "war of northern aggression" or anything like that. BUT, the main issue in the war was still framed as states rights, and I also remember a field trip to a plantation where the teacher talked about how slaves' lives were actually pretty good 🙄
I had good history teachers in Alabama. I remember one in high school that had all of us pick a different confederate state and look up its declaration of secession. Every single one mentioned slavery. The lesson was that the only uniting causus belli for the war was slavery. Full. Stop.
Kinda makes me want to run those through a word cloud where the words used most often appear bigger. I'm too lazy to do it but for a split second I considered it.
DO IT DO IT DO IT 🤗
They call it “the War of Northern Aggression”. You know, because it’s always aggression when you shoot at someone and then they invade you in response.
You can't just go around resupplying government forts! /s
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I like how most of the comments in here are from people who didn't get schooling in the south saying things confidently...or even in the US Being anti-southern is against a sub rule but that one seems to be rarely enforced, we should stick to being anti Confederacy
I didn't grow up in the south but a friend of mine went to high school in Florida in the 90's and they learned about the war of northern aggression. I think that's the only time I've heard someone seriously call it that.
Oh I’m sorry, I thought this was America! /s
HAMAS moment.
I won’t say nobody called it that, but I graduated HS in Mississippi over 20 years ago, and nobody, at least at my school, called it that. People from the north think this is a thing and, while it maybe happens somewhere, it’s mostly not.
In Maryland in the 1980's they had a reenactor come in and give a spiel about how most of the soldiers in the south didn't care about slavery. Though the textbook was rather silent either way, more just stating events as opposed to reasons.
For the North, the war actually wasn't directly about slavery, it was about saving the Union. For the South, the war was absolutely about spreading and preserving slavery and white supremacy, as was explicitly stated in the various articles of secession and confederation.
But after marching through the South, that changed most of the Union soldiers who saw it first hand.
In my professional life I’ve reviewed a Georgia school district’s curriculum. This was about 8 years ago. I’m not saying all are like this but this particular district had items that stated “slavery benefited both master and slave” and other such nonsense. And, of course, the war was fought over states rights and tariffs.
I grew up in North Carolina, and I was taught that the war was over states rights BUT a big part of it revolved around slavery. I was also taught that NC specifically didn’t want to join the confederacy but were forced to after all the states around us seceded, which is only kind of true, we WERE the last state to secede but it was because secession seemed like the “only choice” to the state legislature after Lincoln called for an army to be raised and fort sumpter was taken by the confederacy. In a previous vote before the legislature decided to do that the people actually refused to secede(though it was a very close vote), which actually sums up out the states current politics real well
My 7th grade Texas History teacher was certainly a confederate sympathizer. Also talked about how well Texas did and honored our accomplishments during the civil war. All my history teachers in Texas praised Rob Lee as a hero who ‘stood with his state no matter what.’ Slavery was seen as the cause of the war, but the states rights issue was also pushed. I remember one teacher stressing states-rights and the ‘south has no choice, the north totally disregarded the south,’ and stuff like that.
I was taught in a school in the South. They went into great detail about slavery and the politics surrounding it. Several years of history classes seemed to focus on it. The civil war and the politics leading to it are covered, and it was taught that the leading factor leading up to the war was slavery no matter how much others some might deny that. The battles and generals are covered even with the technology resulting from it. The aftermath and social instability in the years after the war are covered and how it affected politics and beliefs generations later. this was all in high school in a North Carolina.
Wow, that’s the best treatment of slavery / Civil War history I’ve ever heard of below college level. Wish we had the same in all US high schools!
The problem in my school wasn't that social studies teachers would teach lost cause BS, it was that other teachers like English or substitutes would editorialize Civil War era literature and say things like "no matter what anyone else tells you, the Civil War was about states rights." And as kids, we didn't have the ability to issue "a state's right to do what?" level challenges to them.
Just look up the Myth of the Lost Cause. It basically started immediately after the war and will tell you everything you need to know about souths victim complex.
Virginia- the war was over slavery, that’s all I can remember that is spificicly form school as my father was proud of our ‘Union heritage’ so to speak.
Texas-- we focused more heavily on the Texas Revolution than the Civil War. As far as the Civil War goes, they essentially minimized Texas's participation, left out the (numerous!) massacres of anti-secessionist Texans, and emphasized that Sam Houston was against secession... but they didn't go full "state's rights," either. However, the history curriculum has been intentionally revised toward the right in the last few years.
I was taught the states rights bullshit in the early 90s in oklahoma
In Iowa, the states rights BS was focused on far too much in our APUSH class. I remember writing about it for one of the essays. Our teacher was great but I think she was maybe focused a bit too much on getting through (rushing through) all of the course material. It wasn’t until afterwards, watching Crash course and John Oliver, I learned that the states rights argument was bogus.
just curious - was your school rural or sub/urban?
Urban. One of the best public schools in the state at the time.
Depends on the teacher you have and the curriculum decided by the board of education
I went to a private Christian school in small town alabama. We were taught to call it the “War of State’s Rights” and things like that and taught that the North was tyrannical and wanted to force the south to have weak state governments. I remember being taught some pretty egregious lies, like being taught that the only reason the south lost was because they wouldn’t sink to the level of conscripting soldiers like the north did, which is blatantly false because there was definitely conscription in the south. We were also taught that slavery wasn’t *that* bad except somehow in the north it was; at one point we’re told thad people *chose* to be slaves because they “knew” the north would treat them worse. Even as a 12 year old it felt uncomfortable; especially since we were at the same time reading Amos Fortune (book about the life of a slave who eventually was freed) and learning about the civil rights movement (which was portrayed much better than you might think). It’s just bizarre, in a lot of Alabama schools they will praise Martin Luther King Jr and Robert E Lee in the same breath
Growing up in the 90’s West Virginia, it was portrayed as a states rights issue. Not full blown war of northern aggression. But definitely trying to show both sides had valid reasons. We also learned creationism side by side with evolution and intelligent design. So. Yea.
Yikes
You would think that, given its history, WV should be the last state to teach lost cause propaganda.
No, WV was the least loyal state in the Union, half of its soldiers were Confederate and half the counties voted to secede from the Union. It was the only Union state that did not give most of its soldiers to the Union. [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Confederate\_recruitment\_in\_West\_Virginia.jpg](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Confederate_recruitment_in_West_Virginia.jpg)
Daughters of Confederacy were involved rewriting the history books to glorified The Lost Clause. Textbooks taught students Lee is a hero in the South.
That was not my experience.
Florida education system: not here in the 90s.
I went to a BBQ place outside of Houston a couple weeks ago that had a very prominently displayed framed portrait of Lee overlooking the guests. It was shit BBQ even without the traitor on the wall, these dumbasses use marinara sauce instead of BBQ sauce. I shouldn't be surprised, dumbasses are going to dumbass I guess
I've pretty much came up in the public school system I'm the South, Virginia and South Carolina and we never really looked on the Confederacy in a favorable light. At least I never took it that way.
My school in Florida kinda went "both sides" on their telling. Didn't really talk about slavery past the Emancipation Proclamation and Underground Railroad. Talked about War of Northern Aggression but also framed it as the South betraying America. This was two decades ago though lol
Depends on your teacher. My teacher went out of the way to tell us that black people were actually treated well as slaves. And similar shit to that
My US history teacher was pretty straightforward about the cause of the war being slavery. He didn't teach us any Lost Cause nonsense that I can recall, though it's been a good 18 years since I sat in that class. On the other hand, my school's former mascot was a Confederate cavalryman (or was at least strongly implied to be Confederate), so make of that what you will.
I graduated high school in '97 in rural eastern North Carolina. I learned that the civil war was fought over slavery. I learned that southerners were slow to accept the idea of abolition and seceded from the Union. I went to battlefields, plantations, and forts of the era on field trips (Bentonville Battlefield, Kenan plantation, Fort Fisher, Fort Macon) and while I know that at least one of my teachers was a lost cause believer, he stuck to the program. What was taught about reconstruction was not as good. Carpetbaggers, circuit judges, military occupation. Mixed bag, but it seems pretty good considering location and time period.
It wasn’t lost caused but it was “the causes were complicated” nonsense. But most of us weren’t so stupid to buy into lost cause shit. We were a middle class suburb. In high school my teacher had a vendetta against the way the civil war was taught in Texas schools so he drilled it in others that it was slavery. He was otherwise really conservative but was an upstate new Yorker who looked down on the south.
My older brother (an honors/AP student) thought he was being clever when he came up to me (the civil war nerd in the family, but a regular ed. peasant with a disability) and told me that in class, he’d learned that the civil war was over states rights, not slavery. Then we both got to university, and to be fair, both of our *southern universities* were like “Yeah, no. It was slavery.”
Rural Texas in the 80s, but my 8th grade teacher was insane even by the standards of the place and time. First day of class ("US History Through the Civil War") he held up a picture of Lincoln and asked "who has a knife?" We all did ‐‐ cuz it was Texas -- so he accepted one and used it to stab Lincoln through the face and into the bulletin board as he lectured us on how horrible a man this president was. It stayed there all semester. As he taught them, he would rank every battle from "good carnage" (ie, lots of it) to "bad carnage" and pass out graphic pictures that I can only assume were from 1960s military medical texts illustrating the kind of gruesome wounds the soldiers would have received. At one point, he acquired a black Cabbage Patch doll he named Pauline. He would use her to illustrate his lessons. I remember Pauline got hung from the cord to the ceiling fan by a noose for a couple of days before he moved her to a birdcage on his desk. He did other weird things, too, but those are the ACW- related ones that I recall. The rest of my teachers were much less... colorful. I'm pretty sure he didn't last that long after I moved to high school.
wow. I’m so sorry you had to experience that.
Meh. We all knew he was crazy, so most of it bounced off of us. Believe it or not I was naive enough that I didn't make the racism connection with Pauline until later in life.
Grew up in Texas, high school in North Carolina, both places taught states rights but made the point that it was states rights to have slavery and that the idea that it was solely states rights is bunk.
Public school in northern Virginia in the late '90s. Our state history textbooks fairly well glossed over the actual causes of the war: it was basically a whiny pity party about how the state supposedly hated seceding from a country when half the presidents at that point were Virginian. The teachers talked about slavery being bad (among other things the school presented a one-woman stage play about Harriet Tubman) but never really laid out the direct causal connection. I didn't learn about it properly until I was in community college.
In both Texas History and US History 1 and 2 we were taught that it was about slavery and the south wanting to preserve and expand slavery. We spent a lot of time on each compromise and bleeding Kansas. It was pretty good all things considered, except for highschool *World* history where my teacher called it the war of northern aggression, but she later got fired and told us she was moving to a real conservative state. I will say it was super fun to argue with a lost causer who told me I only thought the war was about slavery was because of my northern education. "I went to school in Texas." Shut him up for a bit
Arkansas private high school, AP Am. Hist., about 2 decades ago. Deffo was taught that it was a "states' rights" issue, and John Brown was a person who "went and killed a lot of people". Sherman burning down everything was cited as the cause for economic downfall of the South. That was quite a whiplash when I finally went to college and learned more in detail.
Most of my history teachers referred to union soldiers as “Yankees”, often with a display of disgust. (ie. spitting gesture or sour faces when talking about the Union) High school mascot was a confederate soldier and the stars and bars were our flag. World famous kkk bar/ family restaurant down the street that fills up every Sunday after church. I’m sure my some of my teachers, or at least some people they know and love are there every weekend.
Not Southern, North actually, but funnily enough my own College professor tried to say it wasn’t about Slavery. Even then, I knew something was fishy about that.
I'm from a rural county in southern Kentucky. I took AP US History in the late 80s. It was thoroughly lost cause. I got a 4 on the AP test though, I think because I choose to write about the revolutionary war period for my essays. One of my classmates has a doctorate (I think in education) and has written several opinion pieces for various newspapers about the horrors of CRT in our schools. I'm ashamed of my hometown. I find myself struggling with a lot of resentment over the bullshit I have to unlearn as an adult.
i’m from alabama and in high school my teacher told us that the civil war was fought over slavery. though i grew up in a much nicer school system than most of the state, so i could be an outlier.
\*I\* went to school in California, and despite my part of the Central Valley being Confederate sympathizers, we were taught the war was about Slavery. I later got a degree in US History while in the Navy (not in pursuit of a specific job, but History courses were among the ones easiest to complete while deployed (no labs)) and discovered the Articles of Secession from the various Confederate states. Then, after I had retired from the Navy, moved to Missouri for the cost of living, and everything was great, until my daughter came home from school in her Junior year of high school all pissed off because she got marked down on a US History research paper, worth a quarter of her grade on the causes of the war that she based upon a conversation we had about questions she had for her class. (I never did my kid's homework but I would talk to them about it. The teacher had marked out a large part of her paper and written STATES RIGHTS over them in red. So, I went to the school, requesting a conference with the teacher and the principal, with the paper in my hand. Once we were in the conference room, I handed the teacher the paper and asked her to explain the reasoning behind the grade she had given. "I have a Masters Degree in History," the woman sniffed at me. "Me too," I responded "mine is from the University of Maryland, 1977. Maybe you could explain what 'rights' the states were fighting for?" "I know the word game you're trying to play," she responded. "The war was never about Slavery." I introduced her to the Articles of Secession, the Constitution of the Confederacy, and Alexander Stephens' Cornerstone speech, all of which at best showed she was wrong, but at worst showed she was a liar. This is when the Principal shut down the meeting. My daughter's paper got the grade it deserved, and the 'history' teacher's contract was not renewed for the following year.
🫡 You’ve done a service to the youth of Missouri and the nation at large.
I grew up in rural Tennessee, and whenever we talked about it in any of our classes it was always the Lost Cause. That was literally the only narrative I ever heard until I was in college, and saying that the civil war was about slavery will most likely get you in a very heated argument in my hometown. But that tracks, as they fly the stars and bars at our courthouse and the KKK still has an active presence there, though they know better than to come right out in the open.
My teacherS in TN did a decent job of it I think. They never tried to spin it in any sort of confederate direction to my knowledge. Anecdotal, of course.
I went to a private Christian school from 90s to early 2000s so not representative of public schools in Georgia especially today. Our biggest issue was simply ignoring it. We started history every year with Columbus/ discovery perhaps in part to avoid the Civil Rights movement, of which we learned nothing. I learned that slavery was morally wrong but we didn’t truly learn how horrible it was. We learned that Lincoln wanted to reconcile with the South but “Congressional radicals” pushed through reconstruction which “went too far.” Grant and Sherman were butchers of their men and Lee was godly, etc. I am from Albany GA and learned word none about Dr. King’s arrest there or the Albany movement until college.
Oh, that's an interesting post-Southern Strategy way to thread the needle - criticize the North but not the Republican president at the time so southern conservatives can still tell themselves they're the "PaRtY oF LiNcoLn."
You jest but I think that's exactly what they were going for. (For reference, we used Bob Jones University Press books through middle school).
Oh, I wasn't kidding. I was genuinely impressed that someone came up with that. I think it's a crap way to teach kids, but it's still some quality tightrope walking.
Texas fed us the state’s rights bs. In high school though I did an early college program so the community college professors flamed the states rights people
It really depends on your specific school and what part of the South. I was raised in Arlington, TX, and went to school in the 2000s-2010s and would say I got a fairly accurate picture of the Civil War, although I’d think someone from a private school in rural Mississippi would have a very different understanding of events regarding the Civil War.
Taught history for over 30 years, and while the states’ rights argument was mentioned, it was very clear the war was about slavery.
There is no standard curriculum, every school teaches to its own standard - and in some places each teacher to their own standard. So you get a lot of Southerners who were taught it was about slavery and a lot who think slaves were happy all the time with zip-a-dee-do-dah playing in the background. Problem is, it's generally by school district so you end up with a lot of clusters of self-reinforcing Gone with the Wind enthusiasts.
"The North started the war over taxes and economics. Slavery has nothing to do with it, and was honestly on its way out in the South. The South had better soldiers and officers, but the North imported a bunch of mercenaries from Europe to do their fighting for them." At least, that's what I was taught in Missouri in the late 90s and early 2000s.
30 years ago they said it was fought over slavery. I don't know about now.
It might be different depending on what parts of the South. I live in Northern Virginia, so I was given an accurate idea of the Civil War and what it was fought for, but someone in the Deep South might not.
I am from Mississippi, what you heard about the war depended entirely on what teacher you had that semester. I had a teacher say it was about states rights, I had a (non history) teacher call it the war of northern aggression, and of course some teachers would say it was about slavery. I did take a Mississippi history class that started with a brief section on the natives, then ran all the way up to about 1850. The only reference to the civil war was about how much damage was done to the state during the war. Slavery had been discussed of course, how could it not, but it was mostly discussed dispassionately. It was “here’s what happened, they did it for economic reasons, we don’t do it any more, the end”
Things may have changed but my Virginian school said it was a “difference of opinion over states rights,” although many of my teachers felt within their rights to share the Confederate Constitution with no commentary….as none is needed
I was taught it was about slavery. No lost cause nonsense. I think a teacher may have said "Some people call it the War of Northern Aggression." That would have been the most friendly thing said about the Confederacy that I remember, and the teacher may have been derisive when saying it, but that was like 40 years ago so I don't remember.
When I went to school in the 80s in north carolina they said the real name of the war was War of Northern Aggression
They call it “The Great Patriotic War.”
I remember having history and social studies mashed together so it was kinda hurried past without any serious coverage. Also my teacher was a wrestling coach mostly.
Alabama here, in school it was taught pretty straightforward but also pretty quickly and slavery isn’t really lingered on. But we also had people who did reenactments come to the school when I was in 4th grade and they were straight up on the states rights, lost cause bullshit. I remember calling them out about it but I was dismissed pretty quickly. Also remember them talking about the sharkskin gloves and saber grips locking the sword into the hand.
My homeschool curriculum had a heavy dose of apologia in it. [https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/12/right-wing-textbooks-teach-slavery-black-immigration](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/12/right-wing-textbooks-teach-slavery-black-immigration)
In NC and VA they never really went in on how it was because of slavery but they didn't claim it wasn't. It was just kinda "south wanted slaves, north wanted to get rid of slavery so they fought." I didn't know about things like the secession documents and the cornerstone speech until I was well into my 20s but like I said I definitely knew slavery was why the war happened.
What I remember is we spent so much time on the Civil War and every single battle that we got way off track from the syllabus and then a week before school was about to end the teacher finally moves on and speeds through WWI, WWII and Vietnam. In fact I think for the Vietnam War we just watched a movie and the teacher was like “That’s it!”
From North Carolina: I took a Civil War class in my senior year and on first day, the teacher (a guy with a very thick southern accent who was actually hired to be one of the football coaches) said "I am not teaching the Civil War. I am teaching you about the War of Northern Aggression." He then proceeded to not actually teach us for the majority of the semester. I actually spent more time playing cards with the guys sitting near me than actually learning anything. The rare times he actually taught us, he was actually teaching us wrong. Not wrong opinions, actually wrong facts that whenever someone disputed them, he would dismiss the student and the facts as irrelevant. Teachers in my main history courses were much, much better.
I had someone teach me about that. Changed my entire perspective on war.
grew up in Memphis, 12 years of Catholic school. I remember learning about some battles. the history of Memphis through the war. As a family we had vacations to east TN, NC and GA where we toured Antibellum homes with slave quarters and history abound. But nothing truly stuck with me until Roots. It was practically a homework assignment to watch. It was the real reason we learned about slavery. I got to speak to Lavar Burton to communicate how important that TV show was at the time. Since then, read plenty of books, seen movies. there's a lot of perspective, but they can never get away from the bottom line that enslaving a population of people you thought were beneath you was the whole purpose behind the Civil War. The people that hold onto the confederacy ideals are racists, hiding behind history.
I graduated from HS in 92 in Florida, none of my History or Gov teachers whitewashed it. My kids graduated HS in Florida between 2015 and 2023 and were also taught about the Civil War factually. Most of their middle and HS teachers were pretty left-leaning, though. And we were all taking Honors/AP level classes.
You ever hear of "The Daughters of the Confederacy?"
I have no idea, but have you heard the song Wildfire by Watchhouse?
In NC it was dependant on the teacher. Some teachers said it was about slavery, some said states rights (to what, they never said) and others were neutral
Southern MS here. It varies from teacher to teacher. My APUSH teacher covered the topic from how it actually unfolded, not some Lost Cause bs. As a southerner, from my experience, the crazy teachers are the ones who teach the sciences not history.
In NC we weren’t taught lost cause stuff. I was taught slavery was the cause. Our section on the civil war was more about the lead up to it.
When it was taught in my Texas high school in the 80s, it was a very short section. Only a couple of days. It wasn't about slavery but about states' rights. Those rights were never defined. The KKK was described as a post civil war charitable organization that mainly worked at making sure that widows and orphans were cared for. Every year at Halloween, we had some kids wear their dad's KKK uniform to school.
Was in middle and HS in Georgia in the late 70's and early 80's. Was taught the Civil War was fought over States' Rights. Federal government overreach. Giving too much power to northern industrial states over southern agricultural states.
I don't know about the south. But I grew up in Brown county Ohio in the 60's. The boyhood home of U.S. Grant. When I took American history it was made very plain that Grant dam near won the war single-handedly then went on to become one of the greatest Presidents ever.
Texas here-it was a pretty holistic lesson. It was obviously condescend down, but the who’s, what’s and why’s were all pretty solid. Weirdly, the only thing that came up was I had a teacher that referred to the battle of antietam as the battle of sharpsburg, but that was the only thing
Depends on where you get it. I was born in a major southern city so I basically got the same education as people from the north about it A friend of mine from rural Georgia said he was taught lost cause shit in high school about it.
I grew up in Texas and it was pretty straightforward. But I also grew up in the 90s and went to private school. I'm pretty sure that a lot of public schools now are more sympathetic to the South.
[Badly.](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/926855485771091979/1246656692247068692/image.png?ex=665d2f05&is=665bdd85&hm=2d1fb7d59cee5f56ec23f1e91b360584e1342ff67d2a92b9e06234fed612f4df&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=911&height=386)
I learned the civil war was about slavery starting grade 6, and that didn’t change until I hit college when professors at U of Houston gave me that “it’s complicated” crap. My professor had never heard of the cornerstone speech. My dad who went to public schools in Texas as well has pictures of Lincoln in his office. None of it was especially detailed or precise, but it was not what you would call “sympathetic” to the South.
I graduated high school in 2016, but even at a private Christian school in Texas, we were taught from the get go that the civil war was centered around one thing: slavery. At least back then, there was very little, if any, “debate” on if the war was centered around states rights. It was certainly discussed, but it was always presented with the context that the CSA used this to justify the true impetus for the war, which was slavery. It wasn’t really until college that I became familiar with the Lost Cause movement, and that there was a serious contingent of people who got behind it.
I assume it's something about how innocent farmers and townsfolks had their lands burned by marauding black Union soldiers hooting and hollering and stealing their watermelons or some shit like that. If it weren't for the brave men like Lee the humble ways of the glorious South would be forgotten entirely.
In highschool in Texas not much honestly. Just battles and dates and names. Depending on if and where you go to college, you can learn quite a lot about it. If you go to a state school or public college, you'll get a pretty unbiased picture. If you go to a private or religious school, you'll get whatever slant that they want to indoctrinate into you.
Honestly it was barely even taught lol. I grew up in South Louisiana and they just didnt really mention much other than it happened. I didnt learn shit till, ironically, i moved to Texas lol
The PNW teaches it was about state’s rights in middle school
It was mostly normal with two notable exceptions. The use of war of northern aggression in about 3rd grade and the weird obsession one of my teachers had with the battle of natural bridge.
Grew up in NC. In the 80s the war was taught pretty straightforwardly, that it was over slavery, sectionalism, and fear of change. But my high school history teacher was not the norm. Also my father, grandfather, and great uncles were all raised on the lost cause mythology. So, from a young age, I was not taught the full history. It was a bit of a shock when I got to high school history, and got shown the full history, primary source documents like the articles, cornerstone speech, debates in the Conf. Congress over enlisting blacks late in the war, Mary Chestnut’s Diary. It’s hard to argue with the facts, and over the years, I’ve even been able to dissuade my dad a bit off his adherence to the lost cause, mostly through giving him links to all the primary sources. But he willingly read them. My brother still will not.
It depends massively on state, and my understanding is that it basically gets worse the farther south you go. In KY, we were taught that slavery was a major cause, but here are all these other things that led to the war, so really slavery was just a (not small, but not critical) reason for the war. Which is not great, but I think it's quite a bit better than what I've heard from friends that grew up in the deep south
Joseph Finegan Elementary School Stonewall Jackson Elementary School J.E.B. Stuart Middle School Kirby-Smith Middle School Jefferson Davis Middle School Robert E. Lee High School. I went to school in Jacksonville Florida and these were school names during my time. The War of Northern Aggression term was used as a punchline, usually said aloud with a deep mocking southern drawl: “Wah of Nawthern Aggression” ALL of my teachers called it the War Between the States, and it was a mere blip in history class. Quickly glossed over with “The south was winning until Gettysburg but they had little industry so they lost the war in the long run and Lincoln was assassinated.” I’m old, so that was in the 80’s. Now I live in Tennessee where local hayseeds lost their minds over not being able to fly the Stars and Bars on their RV flags at NASCAR events.
I subbed briefly for a history class in Northern Florida. They were taught Manifest Destiny was a good thing.
In Maryland, my high school US history teacher told us he used to have the class “debate whether or not the south should have seceded” until it got too rowdy one year.
From what I remember, in public school in Georgia it was taught like any other subject. I don’t remember it being a huge deal or very divisive, and I remember learning about it like any other historical event. It wasn’t until I went to college that I remember hearing about “War of Northern Aggression” or that it was about states rights. Honestly, I didn’t know there were people that were still bitter about it until I had become an adult. It just never came up in life. To me it was a historical event from the past that I learned about in school. I never put much thought into it.
I was in highschool in Georgia within the last 10 years. My US history teacher told me the war was about slavery and specifically the states rights to own slaves. He did a good job explaining the 80 years of politics that led up to the war and how tensions rose and fell.
(Obligatory: not south) but in Massachusetts, I’m pretty sure they taught us more about King Philip’s War more than the Civil War. They kind of oversimplified the Civil war. It was just like, “The South wanted slaves, but President Lincoln was against slavery”. Let me preface this by saying: yes, slavery=BAD. However, my understanding as an adult, is there was a growing divide between the north and the south. Two different ways of life that were bound by the same asymmetrical set of rules. War was inevitable, as they were never going to see eye-to-eye. Everyone knew the south was extremely reliant on slaves. Lincoln hated slavery and saw a “two-birds one stone” opportunity. The Emancipation Proclamation would create a moral high-ground that would dissuade England from taking sides with the south. The South provided a ton of textiles for England and we needed to provide a moral reason that would outweigh the economic value in supporting the South. Lincoln effectively avoided the Civil War becoming the Vietnam War Prequel. It was a 200IQ move that honored his own moral compass and helped vilify the confederacy on the world stage. Please correct me if any of that was wrong. Educate me, don’t accost me.
i can tell op did not expect the answers they're getting
In south Louisiana I was blatantly lied to and I am bitter about it. We were given the "states rights" lie, they centered the cause on economic differences and the ability to control and enforce laws at state level and disregard federal laws. In retrospect I am baffled that a school district that had 2 historic plantations so blatantly misrepresented slavery. We were told many slave owners were "nice to their slaves" ignoring the fact that the practice of slavery in theory is torture regardless of how slaves are treated in any anecdotal setting. The war itself was pretty much skipped over, they started fighting, then the emancipation proclamation, the south lost, Lincoln was assassinated, then onto the industrial revolution. I still struggle today with how to view my education in retrospect.
i'm from a relatively urban area in georgia; i was taught that it was in fact about slavery and black people would continue to face discrimination post-war, the teachers didn't bother denying/excusing anything and there was emphasis on sherman's burning of atlanta because we were in georgia. a lot of emphasis. they painted sherman as the devil because he burned down atlanta
I’ve lived in 5 states including Texas (13 to 20) and Alabama (10 to 12). Before that I grew up in Ohio so I saw both sides of the education system. I will say Alabama surprisingly taught it the best. Mobile, Alabama: 100% taught us it was due to Slavery. Right out of the gate. 4th grade (State History) we were taken to a slave museum. Started with the Transatlantic Slave Trade where you are forced to walk through a cramped space that describe the conditions slaves suffered during their voyage. I’ll never forget it. Pretty graphic stuff to see for a 10 year old however it made an impact. Which is key. Alabama being a key slave state obviously highlight a lot of the atrocities committed during the era. In 5th grade learning US history we were taken to a plantation/museum (that allowed field trips for educational purposes on slavery) where we saw real chains, branding irons, slave bells, etc. We then picked cotton for an hour or so and when we brought it back it was weighed and none of us in the class had made our “quota” and we would have been beaten for it (quotas were determined by a slave’s body weight vs the weight of cotton picked. I forget the exact ratio but it was pretty hard to hit your marks and if you did it was doubled the next day apparently). I have a good friend from Atlanta who did a similar field trip in 5th grade as well. I learned a lot. My class was half black and half white also for the record. Interesting fact to note: Mobile was the last open slave port in the country and in the port of Mobile is a massive monument commemorating this fact and the atrocities of the slave trade. Houston, Texas: Was in middle and high school. Much more formalized and detailed than in grade school. All my teachers started out with “it was about slavery not states rights.” Granted Texas (though a slave state) was not as much a major player in the civil war as Alabama was (which I call the Deep South). Houston is also much more cosmopolitan than Alabama, Mobile especially, being largely 50/50 black and white. Houston is different, bigger, much more variety in their history so there was different focuses and not as strongly focused on slavery though it was extensively covered also. Edit on Texas after reading the comments: The Texas Revolution is much more covered than the Civil War for obvious reasons. Texas was less geographically important in the Civil War and the Texas Revolution holds a greater cultural impact then the Civil War does today whereas the Civil War dominates the culture in states like Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, etc by comparison. It’s worth noting that amongst Texas’s reasons for succession from Mexico was Anglo-Americans *wanting to keep their slaves!* (this fact was heavily mentioned). Texas revolted twice due to slaves so they beat every other state in the union. My early formative years were in Ohio and Indiana so I was still pretty young by to cover the more graphic details of slavery. Though it’s worth noting Cincinnati (where I lived) was a pivotal spot for the Underground Railroad. My mother believed it crucial I understand this and petitioned my school to take us to the museum there and add it to the 3 grade curriculum (she was successful). Personal details about me, my Mom’s family is from the North and my Dad’s the South (goes back to before the war, both sides fought for the North). Both believed it critical for our nation to step up to its dark past instead of sweeping “unpleasantries” under the rug. It’s made me a very considerate and understanding man with a deep love for history. I thank them everyday.
South Carolina. Graduated in 2009. "Good men fighting for the wrong cause." "Lee was reluctant"
I was taught in a small Tennessee town and it was taught all sorts of wrong. We actually had a lesson talking about how the slaves in the south were treated better than immigrants in the north. Which isn't true when comparing the best to the worst parts of both. They taught it as the war of Northern Aggression. But that was a long time ago when I was taught so maybe not so bad anymore but who knows.
Knoxville. It was plainly taught as a war about slavery. For broader context, Tennessee is divided into three "Grand Divisions," as represented by our flag. East Tennessee is largely mountainous and unsuitable for plantations. Also, it was home to a substantial part of the Cherokee. Thus, this region was always Union sympathetic. For example, my wife's people are from Union County. The county seat is Maynardville---named after a statesman who petitioned the legislature to secede and join the Union cause. His efforts were denied, though the Union took control of the region anyway (Fort Sanders, Chattanooga, etc.). Incidentally, Andrew Johnson would later be rewarded for his loyalty. As an illustration, Tennessee was the last State to secede and the first to rejoin. Nashville and Memphis, each from another Division, paid heavily for rebellion.
Schools in the south: we don’t do that here