Mike Scruggs
Ludwell Johnson, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the College of William and Mary, rightly referred to the “Civil War” as the American Iliad. First, the war was a defining influence on the American nation. Second, much of the war's political history has been shaped into a pious mythology. My hope is that the Sesquicentennial Commemoration of the war will result in a more accurate and realistic understanding of its issues. Truth is the only certain foundation for freedom.
I am hopeful but not overly optimistic. Political correctness, which is an enemy of both truth and reason, grips American educational and media institutions more tightly than at any time in our history since the Reconstruction era of 1865-1877.
A recent study showed that the average American college senior knows no more about a range of academic subjects than high school seniors of 50 years ago. On history, they know less.
Most Americans have accepted the government approved mythology that the “Civil War” was a morality play in which a noble Union Army marched south to crush the evil slave power and free the slaves. Other economic and constitutional issues are swept under the rug as irrelevant or rejected as racist distortions.
A famous axiom sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill is:
“History is written by the victors.”
Actually, no one has ever confirmed that Churchill ever said this. Judging from other similar quotes in history, however, it surely predates Churchill. It has the terse and penetrating style of an ancient Latin proverb, but no one can confirm that origin either. It is a cynical truism that is often true but can be proven wrong in many instances.
A more hopeful perspective came from the pen of New England poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878):
“Truth crushed to the earth shall rise again; the eternal years of God are hers.”
In 1882, Robert L. Dabney, Presbyterian theologian and former Chief of Staff for Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, urged the graduating seniors of Hampden Sidney College in Virginia to retain all that was true and ennobling in their Southern Heritage. He continued with a rhetorical question:
“Take care that you do not bury…the inspiring memories of great patriots, whose actions, whether successful or not, are the eternal glory of your race and section; the influence of their virtues, the guiding precedents of their histories. Will you bury the names and memories of a Jackson and Lee, and their noble army of martyrs? Will you bury true history whose years are those of the God of Truth?”
In our modern era, these quotes could easily be paraphrased into something like: The political correctness of the times will not last forever. Truth will ultimately triumph.
The immediate consequences of Confederate defeat, however, were realistically anticipated by Irish-born Confederate Major General Patrick Cleburne shortly before his death at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, on November 30, 1864:
“Surrender means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the War; will be impressed by all the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed Veterans as fit subjects for derision.”
The Reverend James Power Smith, the last surviving member of Stonewall Jackson's staff said this in 1907:
“No cowardice on any battlefield could be as base and shameful as the silent acquiescence in the scheme which was teaching the children in their homes and schools that the commercial value of slavery was the cause of the war, that prisoners of war held in the South were starved and treated with barbarous inhumanity, that Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were traitors to their country and false to their oaths, that the young men who left everything to resist invasion, and climbed the
slopes of Gettysburg and died willingly on a hundred fields were rebels against a righteous government.”
Two days before Lincoln's election in November of 1860, an editorial in the Charleston Mercury summed up the feeling of South Carolina on the impending national crisis:
“The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government, from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism.”
Asked how the issue of slavery came to be so overblown as a cause of the “Civil War,”
President Woodrow Wilson said:
“It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war waged against states fighting for their independence into a war waged against states fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery…”
This was also the opinion of English author Charles Dickens, published in December 1861:
“The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.”
Five years after the end of the War, prominent Northern abolitionist, attorney and legal scholar, Lysander Spooner, said:
“All these cries of having 'abolished slavery,' of having 'saved the country,' of having 'preserved the Union,' of establishing a 'government of consent,' and of 'maintaining the national honor' are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats--so transparent that they ought to deceive no one.”
Unfortunately, this propaganda is now deeply entrenched in American mythology.
Mike Scruggs is the author of a recently published book: The Un-Civil War: Shattering
The Historical Myths, published by Universal Media.ordernow@universalmediainc.org
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