I thought I'd write about the Civil War in the context that I was taught it in a Northeastern middle and high school. I've been thinking about how many people have their facts so wrong about the Civil War, its causes and its meanings. People thought the South just wanted nullification or states' rights (which they did, but what did they want to prevent from going away?) or something like that. And sure that's one thing, but like @DragonflyJonez said, and I'm paraphrasing, all those causes are one degree from slavery.
Looking back on what I was told in middle and high school once we got past the part where teachers were afraid to tell us scandalous things like Columbus starting the slaughter of the Native Americans and being generally terrible and the Pilgrims being crazy religious nuts, they told us that what we were led to believe before was wrong; the Civil War wasn't caused by slavery. It was caused by states' rights and John C. Calhoun wanting nullification and all that junk.
My education in Moonachie and Wood-Ridge, NJ wasn't exactly sterling. In fact, it was pretty much garbage (thanks for keeping me out of the Academy, Mr. Weisman! I sure couldn't handle that work when I passed the NY Bar exam!). And that would lead one to believe that the teachers were probably of a lower quality. Wouldn't higher quality schools attract higher quality teachers who would want to work at the best school they could? Wouldn't ol' WRHS be where the lower rung teachers would go in general (there were certainly exceptions)?
I wholeheartedly believed the garbage they were spewing at us until I started reading and watching the History Channel (before it became PawnStars.biz) and taking history classes at Rutgers. To a man, all those sources told us that slavery was what caused the Civil War because those issues that they told us really caused it at lower education levels were just so they could keep their economic backbone in place.
Teachers never really explained why things like the Missouri Compromise and Bleeding Kansas were featured so prominently in our books. I guess they, and by extension, we thought it was just because we now don't like slavery and it affected Congress voting. I guess none of us considered the reason *why* it was so important an issue politically.
What scares me, though, is that the Southern schools probably have even less accurate teachings to children growing up. They call it the War of Northern Aggression when the South started it at Fort Sumter for Chrissakes. So what they're getting probably is less accurate than what we got in the North.
Maybe they're being told from a young age all the inaccuracies we're hearing from them now after the shootings at the church that turned out to be a civil rights landmark. Things about it being their heritage and what they think it represents and all that and what the Civil War was really about.
If one goes off the presumption that they seem to have based on the name "The War of Northern Aggression", the Southerners think they were defending themselves and the flag and rebellion represents them trying to escape oppression the North was doling out on them. And the rate of going to college and probably even high school is probably lower there than in NYC suburbs where I'm from, so it's probably harder for them to figure out the real truth as college professors won't be there for them. Fewer probably have cable and internet hookups too, which prevents learning.
I guess it makes sense to them when there's talk of Sherman's going full Scorch on the entire South up to Atlanta. That's celebrated in the North to a degree, and to a Southerner looks like someone destroying their society (which it was). It just looks like more Northern aggression.
When it's harder to eventually figure out the truth for a multitude of reasons in the South, the "facts" you're told when you're younger are probably more likely to stick and I think that's why they think the flag is their heritage and not a symbol in favor of slavery, which it obviously really is. And that's why they believe the KKK was really their to protect them from the people coming in and not just a mechanism to kill black people. It all is rooted in them thinking they were the victims and had to protect themselves.
That is a patently ridiculous line of thinking from someone who knows better but for someone who doesn't, I guess they don't have much to challenge it.
Well, that's my amateur psychologist take on this and I think it's rooted in education and poverty and misinformation that never gets corrected. Hopefully taking the battle flag down helps a few kids down there get the correct foundation of information to start trying to learn the whole, honest truth.
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