5fish,
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I believe that our civil war history has a southern tilt. I believe somewhere in the early 1900's southern historians and writers hi-jack the civil war and the northern historians went along with it.
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You are more right than you perhaps know.
In the University of North Carolina Press,
The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture, ed. Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh (Chapel Hill, 2004), "Long-Legged Yankee Lies," tends to support your comment.
This chapter goes into much detail on how those who championed the Southern cause went to great effort to create The Lost Cause version of the Civil War.
"The Lost Cause myth helped Southern whites deal with the shattering reality of catastrophic defeat and impoverishment in a war they had been sure they would win. They emerged from the war subdued but unrepentant; they had lost all save honor, and their unsullied honor became the foundation of the myth."
This myth was helped by the dedications of hundreds of monuments to Confederate soldiers and their commanders planted on courthouse lawns and other public spaces across the South. The UCV (United Confederate Veterans) and the UDC (United Daughters of the Confederacy) led massive campaigns to approve "correct" versions of the war for uses in schools, both public and private, and in universitys and colleges across the South. Many children's auxiliaries were organized by these two groups, with their purpose, according to a UDC member, was "telling the Truth to Children," to make the children a 'living monument' to those soldiers of the Confederacy who were fast dying off at this time.
From the book,
"In South Carolina the UCV history committe got a bill introduced in the state legislature to ban any "partial or partisan or unfair or untrue book" from every school in the state and to punish anyone who assigned such a book with a $500 fine or one year's imprisonment. The bill did not pass, but school boards and teachers got the message. By 1905 a UCV leader in South Carolina could congratulate his colleagues that "the most pernicious histories have been banished from the school rooms."
The victor's write the history? Sorry, not in this case. It was the defeated South that took the utmost care to insure it's Lost Cause version became the only accepted version throughout the South.
"As early as 1902 Professor William E. Dodd of Randolph-Macon College, who was a native of North Carolina and one of the few Southern liberals of his time, complained that Confederate veterans had imposed a straitjacket of censorship by requiring courses in American history to teach that "the South was altogether right in seceding from the Union" and "that the war was not waged about the negro." No serious scholarship was possible, wrote Dodd, "when such a confession of faith is made a
sine qua non of fitness for teaching or writing history."
The Lost Cause triumphed in the curriculum, if not on the battlefield. A North Carolinian educated in that state during the 1920s who later left the South and eventually became dean of Yale Divinity School looked back on the books he had read in school: "I never could understand how our Confederate troops could have won every battle in the War so decisively and then have lost the war itself!"
Neo-Confederate historical committees had done their work well. Nevertheless, the crusade could not end. Eternal vigilance was still the price of true history. Few members of the UCV remained by 1932, the last yeare of publication of
Confederate Veteran Magazine. But the UDC and the Sons of Confederate Veterans remained vigilant. The Virginia chapter of the UDC expressed "shock" that year at the news that David Muzzey's all-time best seller among high school American history testbooks, described by the UDC as "atrocious" in its treatment of the South, had somehow been adopted by the Virginia textbook commission to replace a book by a native Virginian. The Sons of Confederate Veterans issued a "Call to Arms" to overturn this decision and return to "the purity of our history." That quest for purity remains vital today, as any historian working in the field can testify."
Sorry, but after reading this one, it's hard to see where all those "Northern" historians are shoving their version of the Civil War down anyone's historical throat.
This reminds me of a quote I saw on another Civil War history board. Seems like I should give it here.
The victor's write the history. The loser's write the myths.
Unionblue
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