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History Mythbusting



It's that time again! "That time" is every 6 months or so! You see a meme or post shared on Facebook, know "this doesn't look right," but don't have the time or tools to pull up some primary sources and evidence to form a response. Well, it just so happens that almost all of the myths about history we see these days revolves around a topic that I am an expert on (or at least, that's what my doctorate tells me): Southern history and the memory of the Lost Cause. I have read more letters from South Carolinian slaveowners in the 1850s and 1860s than I can count. The handwriting is really bad, it was a lot of pain and suffering. Let's put this to work with some compiled sources about these myths, shall we?


The Civil War was about States Rights, not slavery!

Here, have the Vice President of the Confederacy’s thoughts!

  • "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity."

Here, have the South Carolina secession declaration!

  • "But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations.... [The northern] States...have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress, or render useless any attempt to execute them.... Thus the constitutional compact has been deliberately broken....The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor. Those [non-slaveholding] States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery; they have permitted the open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace...property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection......A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the Common Government, because he has declared that the "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that Slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.....On the 4th of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced...that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.... The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy....

Here, have it for Texas!

  • Whereas, The Federal Government has failed to accomplish the purposes of the compact of union between these States, in giving protection either to the persons of our people upon an exposed frontier, or to the property of our citizens; and, whereas, the action of the Northern States of the Union is violative of the compact between the States and the guarantees of the Constitution; and, whereas, the recent developements in Federal affairs, make it evident that the power of the Federal Government is sought to be made a weapon with which to strike down the interest and prosperity of the people of Texas and her sister slaveholding States, instead of permitting it to be, as was intended, our shield against outrage and aggression...

Here, have it for a woman in South Carolina in 1860 who can’t vote OR fight!

  • "it is time for us to shew the rabble of the North we are not to be murdered in cold blood because we own slaves--there are no doubts but thousands would have prefered being born in this beautiful country without the encumbrance--but they have been transmited down to us & what can we do with them?--free such a multitude of half barbarians in our midst--no-no--we must sooner give up our lives than submit to such a degredation...They are not prepared for freedom, many of them set no higher value on themselves than the beasts of the field do"

Keziah Brevard Diary, December 13, 1860.


Have George Fitzhugh, whose slaveowning argument is that slavery is waaay better than free wage labor!

  • Liberty and equality are new things under the sun. The free states of antiquity abounded with slaves...France and the Northern States of our Union have alone fully and fairly tried the experiment of a social organization founded upon universal liberty and equality of rights... in our Northern States the experiment has already failed… we have conclusive proof that liberty and equality have not conduced to enhance the comfort or the happiness of the people...Domestic slavery in the Southern States has produced the same results in elevating the character of the master that it did in Greece and Rome. He is lofty and independent in his sentiments, generous, affectionate, brave and eloquent; he is superior to the Northerner, in every thing but the arts of thrift…We provide for each slave, in old age and in infancy, in sickness and in health, not according to his labor, but according to his wants. The masters wants are most costly and refined, and he therefore gets a larger share of the profits. The slaves are all well fed, well clad, have plenty of fuel, and are happy. They have no dread of the future no fear of want. A state of dependence is the only condition in which reciprocal affection can exist among human beings the only situation in which the war of competition ceases, and peace, amity and good will arise….


Free labor and slave labor cannot exist in the same union! Each new state HAS to pick one or the other! Why do you think Kansas was so bloody? Why do you think the South desperately wanted the two senators each new state brought, to pass more slavery protections in Congress?


The war was about the politics of slavery. It was about the economics of slavery. It was about the morality of slavery (though not as much as we wish). It was about the social systems and hierarchies of a slave society. IN ALL ways, the Civil War was about slavery, and the states’ rights to own their property---their property of people.

Robert E. Lee was a noble man who didn't like slavery and only seceded because he loved his home state!

First of all, I cannot count how many slave owners said "slavery is immoral" but also continued to own slaves, sell slaves, invest in slaves. Thomas Jefferson actually said this, and owned over 500. He also said black people were a different race who could not feel romantic love and that "Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous." (Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1788.


Anyway, back to Lee.

Here’s what he to his wife in 1856, after saying that "slavery is evil":

"In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy."


Lee's wife, a descendant of George Washington and Martha Custis Washington, owned slaves whose parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were owned by our first president, and passed down to each child. According to historian Elizabeth Pryor, when handling the slaves owned by his wife, he separated slave families, breaking up all but one family on the estate, when it was a family tradition going back to Washington that slave families not be separated. https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Letter_from_Robert_E_Lee_to_Mary_Randolph_Custis_Lee_December_27_1856


Lee also was supposed to free some of his slaves upon their previous master’s death, but kept them as property until a Virginia court FORCED him to free them (Historian Elizabeth Pryor).


Here’s what he said after the war

"You will never prosper with the blacks, and it is abhorrent to a reflecting mind to be supporting and cherishing those who are plotting and working for your injury, and all of whose sympathies and associations are antagonistic to yours. I wish them no evil in the world—on the contrary, will do them every good in my power, and know that they are misled by those to whom they have given their confidence; but our material, social, and political interests are naturally with the whites."

He’s talking about who he can get to work the fields now that slavery is outlawed. He suggests Germans or Hollanders or other European immigrants. Notice immigrants are a class below white Southerners, but higher than black Americans. This is the totem pole of race and class.


Finally, he testified BEFORE CONGRESS in 1866 that I do not think that he [a black man] is as capable of acquiring knowledge as the white man is.” https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Robert_E_Lee_s_Testimony_before_Congress_February_17_1866


And finally, on the kindly General Lee, nearly every unit in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia used the Pennsylvania campaign to abduct free black Americans and bring them to the South as enslaved property. He refused to exchange prisoners with Ulysses S. Grant in 1864 because he did not want black U.S. soldiers to be exchanged the same as white soldiers, telling Grant that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.”

It was only after the war that Lee tried to make the war about anything other than slavery, and that slavery was for the good of black Americans. He told the New York Herald “that unless some humane course is adopted, based on wisdom and Christian principles, you do a gross wrong and injustice to the whole negro race in setting them free. And it is only this consideration that has led the wisdom, intelligence and Christianity of the South to support and defend the institution up to this time.

My ancestors were Confederates, but they weren't slaveowners, they were poor farmers, so they had nothing to do with defending slavery.

The Confederacy left the United States to make SURE that your ancestors didn't have a say in politics, then. In South Carolina in particular, there was no such thing as democracy--to serve as a state congressman you needed ten slaves and 500 acres. To be Governor, you needed five times those numbers. In 1860, it was the only state in the U.S. that had its legislature elect the governor and president. Not the people.


Furthermore, in other states those who rented land to poor farmers influenced their votes as landlords. In North Carolina in 1850, David Reed, when running for governor, reminded the elites that the landlord will always exercise a sufficient influence over his tenants without having an additional vote,” since “those who do not own land can never … remain here long, unless the land holder permits him to do so.” (Merritt, Masterless Men).


White elites married their cousins. They owned ALL the land. They actively suppressed poor whites, reminding them that slavery was the only thing stopping them from competing with Black Americans for jobs (and even in the 1850s, groups of white laborers and factory workers came together to complain about their jobs being loaned out to enslaved workers.)


Your poor Confederate ancestors were drafted. Elite whites bought their way out of going to war. Your poor Confederate ancestors had the highest desertion rates, because they realized this new Confederate bureaucracy, which did not allow secession in its constitution, was not acting in their best interest. (Thavolia Glymph, Women's War).


Your Confederate ancestors COULDN’T be anything but secessionists. Unionists weren’t tolerated, except maybe in some border states. If you were a Unionist during secession in South Carolina, Georgia, or Florida, you were dragged out of your home and whipped, or chased out of town. Secession or bust. Were your Confederate ancestors Confederates, or were they too poor to afford treason charges?


And finally, just because your Confederate ancestors, who were taken advantage of and had little say in the Confederacy for which they died in huge numbers, did not own slaves, did not mean they didn’t want to. An enslaved person was extremely expensive, and many poor whites hardly owned land. This did not stop them from renting the labor of enslaved people, of hiring them out for the day. This did not stop them from forming militia groups to capture escaped slaves and receive the bounty. This did not stop them from viewing slave ownership as a sign of social status. The Southern, American dream. And it certainly did not stop them from lynching black people after the war ended.


There were Black Confederates!

Please read Kevin Levin’s Searching For Black Confederates. There were none, because giving a black person….personhood…would defy everything the Confederacy stood for. As seen with Lee, he did not allow them as prisoners of war. They would shoot Black Union soldiers on sight, or re-enslave them. They were denied the glory of dying a soldier’s death. Black Confederates were ONLY allowed as soldiers as a last gasp of the war in 1864. It did not come to much.

The man on the right is not free. He is an enslaved "body servant" or "camp slave"

If you are referring to those who followed white owners into battle, as their manservant, that’s not necessarily a soldier now is it? Confederate camps were run by slaves—washing, cooking, cleaning. White officers didn’t lift their pinkies if they could have their enslaved butler do so instead. Are these the Black Confederates you’re thinking of?


Finally, pulling on this myth is a direct insult to those enslaved in the South who fought the Confederacy day by day, either by escaping to Union lines and freedom, slowing down work on the plantation and increasing resistance to their "masters," or even burning down and robbing the plantation "Big House" that was built on the backs of their own labor. Remember the Combahee Ferry Raid?


The Republicans freed the slaves!

Do….do you honestly think…that we can draw a straight line from 2020 to 1863 and say that the political parties are the same? That today’s Republicans can claim those in the past, or vice versa? That’s ahistorical.


Also…Lincoln’s party was pro-immigrant, pro-expansion of the Federal branch. Democrats yelled with dismay about his parties “despotism.” The Confederacy seceded to “preserve” their way of life, a conservative revolution. If anything, it’s flipped, but I don’t say that because it’s so far from historically accurate of me to do.


That should be enough to do away with this statement, but if not, I would ask you to examine the Dixiecrats of the mid 20th century, and how Southern Democrats slowly yet surely turned Republican as the Democrats in power violated the states’ rights---state’s rights to keep segregating. Yes, the Civil Rights Acts were considered a violation of individual freedom. Look at how George Wallace, longtime governor of Alabama, brought the Confederate flag back into popularity while yelling “segregation now, segregation forever!”


Ole Miss students protesting integration, 1962

It’s not until the 80s that we begin to see the R/D line we do today, with Reagan’s utilization of the Moral Majority.


Black people owned slaves!

They did. In Charleston, South Carolina, there was a free black population with a good bit of wealth. Many owned slaves in an expression of the “status quo,” the need to fit in. Free blacks weren’t allowed to exist in the South without a white guardian, and they had to pay an incredibly hefty yearly fee, each year, to remain freed. It was even more expensive to free an enslaved person, and again, there needed to be a white “guardian” overseeing the entire process. We see a lot of free blacks “owning” other black people, and in many cases they are family members. They do not have money to free them.

Come secession, even Charleston’s free blacks were endangered. Their rich white guardians remained silent as mobs increasingly blamed the free black community for any abolitionist whisper (South Carolinians got super paranoid about slave rebellion right before they seceded. See William Barney's Rebels in the Making or my own dissertation :) ) Cops targeted their houses and communities like never before, making sure they had all of their papers intact or else, re-enslaving them. Most of this community fled Charleston before the Confederacy began.


The Confederate flag is about heritage, not hate!

I am not here to argue what things mean to people. But I can confidently say that historically, the Confederate flag was used by the aforementioned George Wallace to represent white supremacy. You will see the Confederate flag in every-counter protester during the Civil Rights Movement. Why would you proudly fly that flag if there is a chance that someone will look at it and think you stand for this? If this is what it’s meant to be “Southern,” then where to black people fit in to your Southern-ness?

During the Civil War, this wasn’t even the dang Confederate flag! But why would you want to stand for that flag, either, when the Confederacy fought to keep slaves?


There were racists in the North!

Absolutely. It didn’t turn into a war for emancipation until 1863, and just because people thought slavery was bad didn’t think they thought African Americans should be equal. But when we pledge allegiance to the Flag, to U.S. Army generals, they do not just represent 1861-1865, right? But the Confederacy…does.

If we get rid of monuments, we will be erasing history!

Then maybe we should stop cutting money to humanities programs. Also, when have you ever looked at a beautiful, giant monument and not thought “wow, this must be an important person to look up to?”

Monuments are about power. How many people are going to stop and read your plaque that maaaaybe adds context? (Most plaques are actually explicitly racist considering the people who put them up.)

What is the meaning of a monument on your state grounds? Someone that should be looked up to, that the state supports and respects. So why is Ben Tillman on the State House grounds in South Carolina?

Take a look at when Confederate monuments were erected. Take a look at the dedications and quotes in the newspapers for the reasons why people put them up. Take a look at this monument in North Augusta, which is in a lovely part of town. It reads that Meriwether, the sole white man who died when over one hundred armed white men shot and killed six of 40 armed black militia members. The monument says Meriwether was a "young hero" who gave his life “maintaining those civic and social institutions which the men and women of his race had struggled through the centuries to establish in South Carolina.” It further added, He exemplified the highest ideal of Anglo-Saxon civilization. By his death he assured … the supremacy of that ideal.”


These institution he was defending was white supremacy after the war ended. This Hamburg Massacre, in 1876, was led by Red Shirts who used violence to get former Confederate Wade Hampton III elected governor. 87 white men were blamed for this but never faced trial.

The State of South Carolina put up this monument. It was lauded by Senator Ben Tillman, who openly pushed for lynching. Of the Massacre, and the monument, he said this: The leading white men of Edgefieldhad decided “to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson.” Tillman further described the events of that day as “having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable.”


It’s not pretty. And it’s not history, it’s deliberately ahistorical. It's an embarrassment.


The Irish were slaves too! They were even slaves first!

Oof. Okay, the Irish were treated terribly by the English. They were called a savage race, they were forced to work on Irish labor camps that were essentially the first plantations. They were sent to the Americas under a forced indenture and worked alongside Africans under terrible conditions. This happened in the 1600s, and is true. But the numbers, thousands of slaves, etc., are made up. They are debunked by an Irishman here.

Yet slowly, you begin to see in the censuses of the British Caribbean that there is now a designation between “negro” and “white” rather than just laborer--a legal designation that can be seen as early as 1678. There is then a breakdown of "English Irish and Scots" at the bottom, but they are considered white first.


image from Jenny Shaw's "Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean"

There are various white ethnic groups throughout U.S. history that are discriminated against. But eventually, their whiteness comes to be a unifying factor, something that can never happen to a person of color.

In addition, these Irish laborers were never enslaved as chattel. It was a legal bondage of a human being. Africans were viewed as property, a ware, a good. Some were indentured servants, but by 1705 Virginia literally created laws to ensure that white servants were treated better than black servants, and that more and more black Americans would be subjected to slavery than indentured servitude. Under these laws, a white indentured servant could go to court if the man holding their indenture was violent. If a white man killed a black slave, he would maaaaybe get fined. An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves, Virginia Assembly, 1705.

My usage of slave and servant are deliberate. An indenture is a legal agreement to give up one’s rights for 5 to 7 years and work for a person who pays for your passage to the New World. This indenture can be lengthened—if you commit a crime, it can be done indefinitely. But it is not inherited by who your parents are. It is not assumed based on your race. Slavery is lifelong. It is not, it is NEVER, an agreement. In colonial Virginia, two white and one Black indentured servants ran away. The Black man was given indenture for life as a consequence. Look for yourself at the July 9 verdict. You see race-based punishments as early as the 1640s, even though Punch was an indentured servant, not a slave.

Note the difference in punishment for John Punch

The Irish were treated poorly by the English. They were never slaves. From the mid-1700s to 1865, slavery was for those of African descent.

Africans traded Africans as slaves! Other countries, the Greeks, the Romans, all had slaves!

  1. Why does pointing to the sins of others assuage our guilt as a nation? It does not.

  2. This was an argument that pro-slavery authors made in the 1850s OOP.

  3. Slavery has taken many forms in world history. There were varying privileges, and ways to freedom. Sometimes, people were enslaved because their country/tribe was defeated. Slavery did not become synonymous with African and “black” until the European slave trade. That is what we are looking at, historically.

  4. Yes, there were African slave traders. They were paid well for their efforts by Europeans. Often, tribes defeated in battles within West Africa were then enslaved. I am not as educated on this topic as I would like to be, but I do know that the Europeans created the demand for African bodies. I do not know why the existence of African slave traders makes the United States (a democracy, a place of liberty and justice for all!!) any less responsible for their history of slavery.

We can't judge people based on today's standards!

Okay, let’s judge them by their own standards. Abolitionists texts and debates had been circulating since the late seventeenth century. Thomas Jefferson had debates with a freed black man about freedom and Haiti.


Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852. It was BANNED in the South because of its abolitionist content. Yet everyone knew who Harriett Beecher Stowe was. Southern white women called her “Butcher Stowe” in their diaries. The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper, was established in 1831.


Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts (including Maine at the time), New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New York, and New Jersey had either straight up outlawed or put gradual emancipation into effect by 1804.


The Grimke sisters were Charlestonians who believed in abolition and women’s rights. They were exiled from Charleston, their writings banned.


There were countless proslavery writings, from novels (even written by white women), to religious sermons, to political and sociological defenses of slavery written in the 1840s and 1850s. They READ the antislavery texts and responded to them, doubling down on their own thoughts.


Slaveholding diarists wrote that they thought slavery might be a necessary evil, but that sure didn’t stop them from freeing their slaves. They feared, detested, the idea of coexisting with “free blacks.”


These are their times. They chose to reject freedom.


One last thought...

You've probably noticed that all of these statements deal with race and the South. Historians have been in nearly-unanimous agreement that the Civil War was about slavery for years. Why hasn't it trickled down to everyone else?

  • State textbooks and curriculum for public schools are decided upon by heavily politicized groups. A textbook promoting the myth of happy slaves and resistance to Reconstruction as "law and order" was written in 1918, and still used in SC classrooms until THE 1980s!!!! The United Daughters of the Confederacy pretty much ensured that every Southern classroom had textbooks and teachers that were "pro South" (see Karen Cox, Daughters of Dixie).

  • Many students aren't required to read primary sources until late in high school, or even college. With so much information on the internet, it's hard to discern what's legit and what's just a thinkpiece. Even when reading primary sources, we don't often use critical thinking to assess "who wrote this? What was their goal in writing this? Why might we not trust this voice 100%?"

  • In college courses, professors are less bound to state educational standards, teaching to the test, etc., and therefore unpack some hard truths about U.S. history. For daring to criticize the past sins of our country, or hint at how many of these problems never quite disappeared, professors are labeled as un-American.

When I see the myths on Facebook, my first question is always "why are you saying this? What prompted you to share this?" In almost all cases, it's to detract away from America's slaveowning past, and to make ourselves not accountable for this. I see a lot of "whataboutism," or the idea of pointing out another issue instead of discussing the one at hand. (Think "other countries had slaves too." Yes, Kevin, and?)


We (white people) don't want to be blamed for slavery.

This knee-jerk defense of ourselves needs to be investigated. Obviously, I did not own slaves. The person who shared the meme on your fb didn't own slaves. But why are we trying so hard to defend the people who did? Why are we so afraid to recognize the sins of our forefathers? Why are we so worked up about monuments to people who killed U.S. soldiers that we would devote millions of dollars to preserving their glorification? Or threatening 10 years in jail just for spray painting on a racist statue, like the President has done? Why do we say "we can't erase history," but stop funding the humanities and call professors, who teach history, socialists or anti-American?


What would be so bad about acknowledging that the U.S. South has a long history of violently oppressing black people, and pledging to use our status as white people to fight against racism? Of positing that maybe we shouldn't put human beings on pedestals (whether they be in our memories or in statues), as they are bound to disappoint us?

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