I started doing some Civil War reading this year, before I even thought about the whole 150 year anniversary business, currently being well-chronicled by the New York Times Disunion blog and The American Interest's Long Recall. I listened to the Yale history course on the subject by David Blight. This isn't a new thought by any stretch of the imagination, but it's just amazing how the South won the narrative of Civil War and Reconstruction memory for over a century. I think about reading JFK's (ghost-written, but still) Profiles In Courage in high school. One of the profiles is of Edmund Ross, the Kansas Republican Senator whose vote was decisive in the acquittal of Andrew Johnson after his impeachment trial. The whole tone of the profile is how the Radical Republicans in Congress were overreachers, pushing the South too hard, and attempting to make an unconstitutional power grab for Congressional supremacy over the Presidency. There's certainly a strong case to be made for Johnson's acquittal: the Tenure Of Office Act which he unquestionably violated was an awful law, correctly ruled unconstitutional later. But elided in Kennedy/Sorenson's profile was the simple fact that Johnson was a terrible, terrible president (Lincoln's greatest mistake), attempting to block the Radicals' efforts to achieve some measure of justice and equality for four million former slaves. The South left to its own devices would do everything in its power to grind those people back into servitude, and remove their newly won suffrage. As Northern Republican will faded through the 1870s in the face of Southern political terrorism and an economic panic, that's exactly what happened. The Redeemer governments replaced Republican rule in the former Confederacy, and they were all permitted to utterly ignore the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments for nearly another one hundred years.
Yet in the face of all that, the dominant narrative as late as my own schooling in the 70s and 80s was that the bad guys of Reconstruction were the Republicans, the black Southern officeholders of the time, and the carpetbaggers. I also recall the attitude we all have when we're first coming into a more adult way of thinking about the world: we want the enjoyment of a sophisticated attitude, eschewing the simplistic narrative told to us as children. So we were taught and embraced the idea that the "Civil War was about slavery" narrative was childish and mostly false. There's plenty of complexity in why the war happened, but the childish explanation is really the correct one. Lincoln was elected, the South feared that having lost control of the federal government, abolition was in the cards, not immediately but inevitably in the decades to come. So they left. They didn't leave because of tariffs, and they didn't leave because of any nebulous states rights. They couldn't have been any clearer about it. They proclaimed it for all to see in their secession announcements. (One of the great ironies of the secessionists is what a colossal blunder they made. They feared the eventual loss of slavery many years hence, but their choice meant the near immediate end of slavery, beginning less than two years later, completed in five.)
But having lost the war, they immediately set about rewriting it, with the greatest of success. The victors lost interest and mostly capitulated, settling in to the enjoyable reunionism of mutual valor and Blue-Gray soldier's gatherings. The essential, one sentence truth about the war, that a monstrous ideology was defeated, was turned by the Lost Causers into a simplistic lie, believed only by the infantile.
