My father told me that, when he was a student in primary and secondary school, he developed an admiration for the Confederacy that he thinks was based upon the way the Civil War was taught (and this was not in the South, BTW) in the classroom. The South’s generals were presented as wise and noble, the North’s generals as at first incompetent, and then later brutally efficient (Grant and Sherman). Slavery wasn’t discounted as an issue, but was presented as one of several equal issues between North and South. Reconstruction was presented as the onslaught of Northern carpetbaggers inciting ignorant former slaves into paroxysms of misrule, ending when the South returned to its natural order after 1876.

When I was in school the tables were turned, and rightly so. OF COURSE slavery was THE issue that caused the Civil War. Discussion of war tactics was much more balanced, and emphasized the fact that the South’s warmaking success was doomed under almost any scenario due to its economic backwardness compared to the North. And Reconstruction was presented in its true light as a struggle by the forces of Southern conservatism and racism to regain the upper hand against their opponents.

It’s an outrage that there are still some in this country who don’t recognize the historical truth of the Civil War. And they tend to be Tea Partiers too. What a coincidence …