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Forum speaker tells university audience: Effects of ‘bad history’ still felt

The Civil War ended 150 years ago, but most Americans still don’t know the main reason it started, contends the author of a bestselling book about “bad” history education in textbooks.

And even fewer are probably familiar with what Dr. James Loewen calls “the most important era in U.S. history you’ve never heard of”—an era, he adds, that’s still relevant today.

Speaking Jan. 27 at Bluffton University, Loewen asked his audience to vote for one of four possible answers to the question of why the Southern states seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861—slavery, states’ rights, the election of President Abraham Lincoln or issues with tariffs and taxes.

States’ rights received the most votes, followed by slavery—a result, he noted, that has been the same wherever he has posed the question nationwide.

But consulting a primary source, South Carolina’s “Declaration of Immediate Causes” for secession in December 1860, “gives us a clear answer why,” said the professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont.

South Carolina state fathers were upset with 14 northern states that hadn’t fulfilled their “constitutional obligations” by failing to enforce the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Loewen explained.

The federal law, which he called “the most draconian law passed in the U.S. before the Civil War,” required the return of all escaped slaves to their owners, and the cooperation of officials and citizens of free states. Anyone who had been unjustly labeled a slave couldn’t testify in federal court against a white man, he pointed out, and when a case went to court, judges were paid $750 (in today’s dollars) by the federal government if they ruled for the supposed owner but only $375 if finding in favor of the African-American.

Northern states, however, began enacting laws in defiance, angering South Carolina and its Southern brethren. Pennsylvania, for instance, declared that police wouldn’t be paid for time spent looking for fugitive slaves, Loewen said. In addition, New Hampshire was letting black men vote—a right not granted nationally until the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870—and New York stopped allowing “temporary slavery” of African-Americans brought to the state by their Southern owners.

So, while allowing that Lincoln’s election played a role, he said the Southern states’ secession was really “all about slavery and actually all against states’ rights.”

But reality has been distorted over the last 150-plus years, said Loewen, whose 1995 bestseller, “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong,” has sold more than 1.5 million copies.

The problem dates, he asserted, to what he terms “The Nadir,” from 1890-1940, that “most important era in U.S. history you’re never heard of” when race relations in America reached a low point “and the U.S. got more and more racist.”

Beginning in 1890, 25 years after the Civil War’s end, old Confederates and Neo-Confederates “stood history upside down” by claiming the Southern states had fought for states’ rights when they were actually against them, Loewen maintained. In 1890, he added, “the South won the Civil War,” renaming it “The War Between the States”—which no one had called it while it was in progress—and starting to erect Confederate monuments.

This was all part of an effort to rationalize and defend the South, he said, noting that lynching was also allowed and the Ku Klux Klan experienced a revival that lasted until 1930.

He also pointed to the 1890 ratification of a new Mississippi state constitution that stripped the vote from black men and served as a model for other Southern states for the next 17 years. And the federal government just “let it go,” he continued, tying the North’s acquiescence to “unclean hands” that were complicit in white supremacy as well.

The “bad history” perpetuated about the Civil War and its aftermath in textbooks not only “makes us all stupid,” he said, but also bolsters white supremacy by minimizing the role of African-Americans and validating the Confederate cause. Textbook distortions also help alienate people of color from school, especially in history and social studies, where the achievement gap is highest between African-American and white students, he added.

Among the legacies of “The Nadir” were “sundown towns,” purposely all-white communities that Loewen has studied and written about as well. He said he has found 507 such towns in his native Illinois, and estimates that roughly 70 percent of Ohio towns—including many in northwest Ohio—fit the exclusionary description, too. Forcing African-Americans out is illegal now, but it still happens, albeit in more subtle ways, he said.

Loewen listed admission, apology and changes in practice as requirements for breaking from bad history and sundown towns. He urged his student listeners to act for change if they know of a sundown town, and to push for teaching in their high schools about “The Nadir” and its ongoing importance.

Patriotism entails teaching about what America has done wrong, as well as right, he said. “Don’t let anybody accuse you of not being patriotic when you try to tell the truth about history.”

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