What Our Textbooks Get Wrong About Slavery

LOADING ERROR LOADING The white people of the Confederacy didn’t mince words. When South Carolina voted 169-0 to become the first state to secede from the union, the articles of secession bemoaned the “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery.” Later, on the eve of the Civil War, when Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens delivered a speech outlining his vision for the new nation, he declared the Confederacy would be founded “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man” and that “the natural and normal condition” of African-Americans was slavery. Yet despite the Confederacy’s own candor, a 2011 Pew research poll found that nearly 48 percent of Americans still believe the Civil War was a fight over “states rights.” Meanwhile, a 2018 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center found that only 8 percent of surveyed high school seniors identified slavery as the driving cause of the Civil War. In the ensuing decades, many children’s history textbooks characterized the Civil War as a fight between independent-minded Southern states and an overbearing federal government, or as the textbooks call it “states rights.” “Relying on primary sources are an excellent substitute because you point to the words of the people themselves. “They are clear that slavery is the central cause of the secession and the glue that is binding the states of the Confederacy.” For Waters, using primary source documents in her classroom is as much about engaging her students’ critical thinking as it is about steering them away from false narratives around the Civil War.