For more than a century, school districts preferred textbooks that taught students about “happy slaves” and framed the Civil War as a disagreement over taxes.
I didn’t learn until over a decade later that Lincoln added the slavery issue to get more political and cultural support for the war, which was not going well.
Interesting - you "learned" things that aren't at all true. It was indeed about slavery and white supremacy - the Confederate states said so quite plainly / explicitly in their statutes that they passed to secede from the United States as the sole reason for doing so. Their politicians said so in their speeches. I take them all at their word. Original sources straight of what they said with their own pens and their own mouths - not what someone "said" they said. I think they know why the seceded more than revisionists trying to whitewash the reality of it after the fact.
“I didn’t learn until over a decade later.....”
Yeah well.... it took over 40 years for me to find the truth via a book found at a second-hand store. Read it and was enlightened. Then I got PO’d for being lied to in my early years.
I was in public school in the ‘70s and ‘80s and you better believe the standard talking points were in place. At least in this liberal, slightly Yankee area.
There was little to no talk about living conditions, though. So no “happy slaves”, but no genuine discussion about how slaves were treated, etc. just a tacit understanding that the south was evil.
The point was overall history. Not specific cultural and lifestyle history.
While my mother is huge on American history and partly taught it, going by school and news and TV of the time, we were definitely supposed to believe the US was perfectly correct in the CW. Otherwise, not so much. Which is exactly the liberal mindset. They hate the US and everything about it, except the CW where suddenly the US did everything right and was the good side.
Really? They didn’t teach you that? I came up quite a few years behind you so maybe the culture shift was already swinging but we learned that the civil war was not really about slavery but that the political influence of the abolitionists was necessary.
I live in the real world not the ideological one. So I accept that in war you need allies who may be in the fight for their own reasons.
Just read the original article of succession from South Carolina. At the start the South said it was about slavery and the North said it was about preserving the Union.
Confederate States of America - Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
You ought to go back and re-read the various declarations of secession of the southern states.
Alex Haley released ‘Roots’ in 1976. It told the story of slavery. No school since then even discussed ‘happy slavery’. The very thought of slavery was inhumane for centuries. My family came here from Switzerland in 1729 as Mennonites, dead set against slavery.
Lincoln did no such thing. He waited until the war WAS going well so that he had the clout to end slavery.
Further, no one ever read about happy slaves or that other bs.
We were taught slavery was a great evil and Lincoln the Great Emancipator.
The secession happened exactly because Lincoln was elected and he was going to end extending slavery to territories (future states) which meant slavery was doomed and the South knew it.
Everything else is revisionist nonsense. I had one of these idiot professors in college. He also taught that FDR was a fiscal conservative because he wasn’t left wing enough. And Lincoln didn’t free any slaves.
And even if that were remotely true, did anybody notice in fact every slave was freed.
Must have been magic.
We also marched for Civil Rights and had a Black Prom Queen - she was a friend of mine.
Unless you are our age, you lack perspective.