dear historians: "google" is a starting point...

[acroyear]

...but you better damn well double-check the potential bias factor of your sources before you go including it in a textbook, dammit...

Loudoun schools remove textbook that claims black soldiers fought for South:

The publisher has said it will provide a sticker to cover the flawed sentence in "Our Virginia." The state Board of Education, which approved the book, said this week that the claim about African Americans fighting for the Confederacy falls "outside of mainstream Civil War scholarship."

The textbook's author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian, told The Washington Post this week that she substantiated her assertion about black Confederate soldiers primarily by doing an Internet search, which led her to the work of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and some other sources. The heritage group disputes the widely accepted conclusion that the struggle over slavery was the main cause of the Civil War.

Comments

[stori-lundi.livejournal.com]

As a native Southerner and someone who qualifies for the Daughters of the Confederacy (yee-haw!!) I somewhat sympathize with the CV over slavery being a cause of the Civil War. There is a big difference between the political cause and the social cause of the war. Certainly slavery was a big political cause linked to states rights but the majority of Southerners, including my ancestors, never owned slaves. I'd wager the average Southerner was fighting because he was either conscripted or was mad because some Yankee troops came through and pillaged and/or burned his house and property. Then you have the Shenandoah Campaign in VA where there were no clear dividing lines between Union and Confederate. People tended to fight against the side that raided their lands first. Even in the same family, people fought on both sides of the war. So again, if you asked the average Southerner why he was fighting, slavery would probably not be on his list of reasons. Yet if you asked the politicians, that would certainly be at the top of their list.

I compare it to Nazis vs. Germans. The average German wasn't a Nazi and may have even disagreed with them. German troops weren't Nazi troops yet history seems to lump them together. If I were German, I wouldn't want my child to feel ashamed of his German heritage because he only learned about Nazis in school. Likewise, I don't want to be lumped in with slave owners and racists because of my Southern heritage as well.

It's a complicated issue and certainly a tough one for school textbooks to cover in a fair and balanced manner, especially here in the South. There still is no excuse for relying on the Internet for source material. But sadly, history isn't the only subject that is being mangled by bad textbooks.

[vconaway.livejournal.com]

First, the average German went a huge way to both tolerating and implementing the Holocaust (Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Goldhagen, among many other works).

Second, the vast majority of southern secessionists were, as you say, not slaveholders. However, that doesn't mean that they didn't have a stake in slavery as an institution. White supremacy played a huge part in antebellum southern white identity, and even white farmers at the bottom of the income and social scales were invested in keeping black slaves beneath them. These soldiers were not fighting for their slaves, they were fighting for their culture, to which slavery was an integral part.

Third, to address the point of the original article, there were no black confederate soldiers because it was expressly illegal to arm them for any purpose. In the last months of the war this was overturned by a desperate government and the army began recruiting and training black soldiers, but the war ended before any substantial number of them could fight.

[stori-lundi.livejournal.com]

White supremacy was a universal view at the time and not just limited to the South. While the North outlawed slavery, blacks weren't exactly welcomed with open arms and often times sent back to the South. The Dred Scott decision ensured that slaves were still slaves even if they made it to the North. Face it, at the time, the entire US was a bunch of racist bastards; it wasn't just a Southern thing.

[vconaway.livejournal.com]

You are absolutely correct, and I never meant to imply otherwise. However, since the north (outside of a few cities) had far fewer black inhabitants it wasn't nearly the daily issue that it was in the south.

Complicated My Butt!

[motherwell.livejournal.com]

Here's a blog post that quotes explicit statements by Southern political leaders -- including a Governor of VA and the CSA Secretary of State -- stating that they were leading a secessionist movement for the sole purpose of protecting their "right" to own other human beings:

http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/03/slavery_and_the_civil_war.php

And no, the fact that lots of Southerners never owned slaves is irrelevant. So is the fact that racism didn't just exist in the South. And so are all the other points you make here.

[uncle-possum.livejournal.com]

Aside from the historical argument (was it *really* economics, slavery, culture war, or what)--the problem with this sentence is that the author is a popularizer, whose major works are short-entry cyclopedias of semi trivia, based on secondary and tertiary sources. (Oh Yuck, and Oh Yipes, iirc, books for kids and YAs about oddball stuff in history).

There are plenty of professional historians, many of whom can and have written elementary school textbooks. Some are liberal, some conservative, some libertarian, etc. But all know how to do research, and where to look. (And, when they run across a "fact" that appears outside the generally accepted current interpretation, they check it out.
(Aside from the general claim, note that the book says 2 "brigades" of slaves were formed under Stonewall Jackson--a lot of slaves armed in the first half of the war doesn't seem likely, and Jackson was killed in '63. It's easy to check on the units under a given area commander).

So, why did the state hire an amateur popularizer without any serous editorial board? (CNN reported that the editorial people were three elementary teachers, who are, more or less by definition, generalists, not experts, in history).

Being curmudgeon here, but up until about a decade or so ago, textbooks were heavily vetted; but that costs lots of money and takes time.