How was the Civil War depicted when you were a child?

The first time I recall hearing of the Civil War was at my grandparents’ dinner table. When I was around eight, my paternal grandparents finally allowed me to leave the kitchen – where all the grandchildren normally ate dinner – and join them in the Dining Room. Their neighbor from across the road was a guest that night. I knew better than to speak unless requested, so I dutifully listened (which given Granddaddy Davis’s penchant for erudite discourse I was happy and privileged to do).

          At some point during that dinner, the neighbor launched into an excited monologue regarding what he referred to as “the war of Northern aggression.” As best I recall, his point was that the southern states wanted the freedom to live their lives as they had chosen and the northern states insisted on imposing their view of how life should be lived. According to him, all the southern men and boys raced to join the fight voluntarily because they prized their freedom while the northern army had to be drafted involuntarily and paid to fight because the northern men and boys did not want to join the war.

         As I recall, Granddaddy Davis responded. He called it the Civil War. Apparently, a man named Lincoln believed that we were all stronger as a united country than we would be as separate states. Also, some of the northern people believed slavery was evil and should be abolished, which he found understandable because they did not have cotton farms in the north. The mistake in the south, according to Granddaddy, was they called the black people “slaves.” The “damn southerners” should have called them employees and paid them a pittance in wages – like they did in the factories up north – instead of supplying them with food and lodging in return for their drudgery picking cotton.

          In that discussion I learned that East Tennessee (where we were) mostly fought for the Union because we did not have slaves. Our small farms were capable of being worked by one family of able-bodied men, boys, and women, so we did not need – nor could afford – slaves, or employees for that matter. That was according to Granddaddy. The neighbor was of the view that Vice-President Johnson “sweet-talked” East Tennesseans into believing the “bullshit” which the man named Lincoln was dishing out.

          While that dinner was surely educational, I forgot about it the next day as I enjoyed playing ball with my brothers and cousins followed by our daily walk into the little town where one of my grandmother’s brothers owned the grocery store and provided us with candy and her other brother, who owned the drug store, provided us with ice cream. When pleasures such as those are available, who cares about what happened almost 100 years ago.

            My next encounters with the Civil War were in elementary school. We studied American History in the 4^th, 6^th, and 8^th grades. I believe in each year the War was presented as one waged by the Union (comprised of northern and border states) against the Confederacy (comprised of certain southern states). While the primary focus was on the various battles, to the extent we focused on causes they were (1) to rid the country of the evil of slavery and (2) to preserve the potential strength of a country that included all the states rather than two different countries. We learned that in Tennessee and Kentucky people were divided resulting in some cases of brothers fighting against brothers and/or cousins. By eighth grade, I probably could have recited Lincoln’s Gettysburg having spent entire classes solely on its dissection.

            I am confident that teachers in some schools in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Virginia, and the Carolinas may have placed a different slant on the War, but in our elementary school we were taught that slavery was evil; however, Lincoln’s reason for mobilizing the northern states and sending them to war was the maintenance of a United States that included all states. We were taught Lincoln’s brilliance was not in ridding the country of slavery but rather ensuring the country’s bright future by fighting to keep it “united.” So, slavery in the South may have been evil, but the North was not presented as the “Union” and was not characterized as good – just different.

            Our high school offered only one-year of American History and it was the same slant as in elementary school – just more information mostly about the various battles. As an aside, the high school did require every student to take Civics – a course that covered in detail the U.S. Constitution and the three branches created thereby, as well as the organization of the Tennessee State Government and the governmental organization of the county and the city. The agencies created to effectuate federal law were taught in some detail – maybe to be sure we knew how to fight the I.R.S. We were taught that it was our duty as citizens to know how our government – federal, state, and local – worked and how to assert our grievances in each system.

               The primary period where the “North” was depicted as other than the “Union” was when we studied Reconstruction following the Civil War. There we focused on good and evil. The “carpetbaggers from the North were depicted as evil -- inflicting their harm on both black and white Southerners. At the time, I decided that the reason blacks did not swarm to the North to escape the bias they faced in the South was because of the bad impression Northerners must have made on them during Reconstruction. To this day, blacks are a far higher percentage of the populations of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina than New York or Massachusetts. If they were so mistreated by Southern white people, why did they stay?

              There were a variety of U.S. history courses at Harvard. I only took one course, since my concentration was on Government courses most of which touched on various aspects of American History but none on the Civil War. The history course that I took was called “The Liberal Tradition in America.” Laughably today, the word “liberal” back then meant American’s fierce resistance to governmental intervention in their lives, especially federal governmental intrusion.

            The point of the course: America’s open lands allowed people to continue moving westward to enjoy freedom at the first hint that the government – federal or local – was seeking to make them do something against their will. By today’s standards, these people would be MAGA in the extreme.           

               Of course, the fact that we were taking land away from the indigenous people was glossed over in the course – but not in the classrooms that I attended. (Harvard taught by having “the great professor” lecture scores, and sometimes hundreds, of student once a week, followed by two weekly “section” classes of about 10-15 taught by post-graduate students working toward their doctorates.) My Cherokee DNA ensured my classroom included a discussion of the price being paid for this “liberalism” engulfing more and more land as the westward journey for “individual freedom” continued.

           There was a brief section on the Civil War in the course, but it seemed aimed at demonstrating to us that Lincoln did not necessarily feel that slavery was “evil.” Among the required reading were Lincoln speeches in the South when he was running for President in which he expressed such ideas as “where there are two different races, they cannot live as equals and therefore I prefer the white race be in charge.” With no television, radio, or internet, you could say things in one state without fear of people in other states hearing about it. While I did come to see Lincoln as a politician, it did not change my view that he was a hero for fighting to keep this country united.

           Eighty years later, the world should have been thankful we were still the United States of America. As Churchill put it when hearing of Pearl Harbor, “They have awakened a sleeping giant.” God only knows what we would have been had the country been split. (On the other hand, the southern and midwestern states, along with Montana and the Dakotas, would probably not object if California, Washington, Oregon, and New York wished to secede today.)

                Accordingly, from the outset I was taught that the Civil War involved an indifferent North against an impassioned South over secession. Slavery, which we were taught was second only to genocide among the list of evil things humans have done throughout history, was a secondary aspect of the War according to my teachers. Outside the classroom I do not recall the Civil War being discussed, perhaps because the Vietnam War consumed our attention from the early sixties through the early seventies.

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