So this isn't exactly a "slavery" lesson, more of a "civil rights" lesson, but I think it was one of the best demonstrations of unfair treatment towards a group of people that my third-grade brain had encountered. States rights issues now like gay marriage and drug use would have been comfortably state decisions. 8 comments. Those slaves were the engines that drove the Southern economy which you claim was strangled by tariffs, even though: Southerners agreed to and often wrote the tariffs, which were mostly pretty low. She's learning about the Civil War now and doesn't have a reddit account, so I thought I'd get some info for her. The South had a decade-long boom that even withstood the Panic of 1857 without much trouble immediately prior to secession. For example, if I raised my hand, he would angrily ask, "What do you want?!" Middle was in Florida and I was in a mostly black school. We talked about the economic conditions in the southern colonies, the Caribbean islands, and Central/South America which made slavery blow up. But there had been a struggle in American politics that went back to the founding of the nation itself over big vs. small government.

High school was a little more in detail but it's not like we learned about it all that extensively. While antebellum Americans often have quite generous expectations of economic growth, even by their standards that doesn't count as struggling. You can find his book free online here. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. After the Emancipation Proclamation, the need to cling to this “state’s rights” narrative became even more important for the south, because they had to sell their struggle to Britain and France (who they hoped would recognize them) not as a fight for slavery, but as a noble struggle for autonomy. When talking about brave uncle, dad, grandpa, etc. Basic people owned people and it was bad kinda stuff.

I went to elementary and middle school in Arizona and high school in Maryland. How did you learn it? Excerpted from Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South by Marie Jenkins Schwartz. There were other issues involved but the elephant in the room was slavery. Press J to jump to the feed. The other thing to remember is that, at this point in history individual state rights and slavery were intimately tied issues. Sorry I don’t have any sources to link on this – my distillation of the topic is sort of an amalgam of a number of other historians who have written on the subject in prefaces, etc. It's practically the whole reason the naval station at Pensacola exists. Southern politicians almost always did not flinch to use big government when it suited them and supported their aims. Also from NY. History is ever changing and simply put, she learned this because that's what her teachers were taught - depending on how long ago they attended school. New comments cannot be … Edit: I would add that it's not still being taught that way. Some of the very same people who, just a decade later, would lead the C.S.A. No text book I've run across in teaching 3 sections of US to 1876 has said anything about state's rights, I graduated from high school 10 years ago and even then I was told it was fought over slavery. When talking about states' rights, the immediate question should be: the states' right to do what? For science!

Press J to jump to the feed. Some of the states even complained that Northern states were nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 - they were arguing that the federal government wasn't exerting enough power to protect slavery, which directly contradicts the idea that they were fighting for states' rights. Thanks for your cooperation and enjoy the discussion! Edit to clarify: Why it's still being taught in some circles. Now, just to briefly interject. Just read this after posting. This is pretty much how I learned it was well. Overall, I feel like it was taught pretty clearly, I understand not getting into all the gory details in 2nd grade (around 8 years old), and holding that stuff off until high school. For most, probably not so different from the way you learned it. What the C.S.A. I was educated in a California public school system and we learned that for all intents and purposes the civil war was about slavery. The teacher gave no context as to why he was doing any of this. use the following search parameters to narrow your results: subreddit:subreddit find submissions in "subreddit" author:username find submissions by "username" site:example.com find … :(. Also that the majority of southern people did NOT have slaves, and that most of those that did treated them very well. If you see others posting comments that violate this tag, please report them to the mods! Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts, Moderator | Antebellum U.S. Slavery Politics. We talked about how the North, despite being largely opposed to slavery, was still pretty racist, and that manifested in them trying to send free blacks to Canada and later Liberia. Did slave owners simply not teach that portion of the Bible to their slaves? At its most basic, this narrative bias in what you might call the southern-influenced historiography’s emphasis on state’s rights as the root of the American Civil War was born the day of Lincoln’s election as President. Not as a necessary evil, not as a good means to bringing Africans up to modern Western standards. You ask a great question, but also a complex one. ", http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/cornerstone-speech/, http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2015/0708/The-famous-1861-Cornerstone-Speech-that-aimed-for-hard-truths-about-the-Confederate-battle-flag-video. I think reading Blight's Race and Reunion would be beneficial to better understand the Lost Cause mindset, the politics of memory, and why the Civil War was taught differently in the southern states than in others. It would be a good read for your friend. Press J to jump to the feed. This thread is archived.

serious replies only. Answers must be in-depth and comprehensive, or they will be removed. We were taught that there were many reasons for the civil war, not just slavery. foisted a law on the free states that makes the entire state rights argument seem, to me at least, like a complete farce. We studied the Atlantic slave trade pretty extensively. It seems that the story of Moses and his escape from Egypt would have been easy for the slaves of the south to relate to.

Just before the war, southerners pushed for naval construction to compete with Britain and ironically, it was some of those vessels they supported constructing that ended up blockading their ports as part of the Anaconda plan once the war started.

About one-third of Southern households had slaves and far more benefited indirectly from slavery.

Pretty clear cut, "it was bad, but we know better now". Yet the south saw Lincoln’s election as a harbinger of a rising abolitionist tide, and pushed hard for secession as a result. After graduating teachers are not under any obligation to keep up on current research, I'm not a Civil War historian but I did get my master's from a moderately sized university in the south where I was required to take courses on southern history and can say that no one actually teaches this any more. He explained then to the class what his intentions were and he apologized to me but the other students made fun of me for crying. Is it a semantics thing? She's learning about the Civil War now and doesn't have a reddit account, so I thought I'd get some info for her. Friend of mine grew up very very very conservative in the deep south and learned about "The War Between the States" in school, which was a war for state rights, and not slavery. Friend of mine grew up very very very conservative in the deep south and learned about "The War Between the States" in school, which was a war for state rights, and not slavery. A reporter visiting there, Sidney Andrews, wrote extensively about the political arguments and debates going on. Looking at the 1860 census, fourteen plantations were listed as holding more than 500 people in slavery, and eight of them were South Carolina rice plantations, with a ninth a rice plantation in Georgia. In other words, if the tariff is cutting into their profits it's cutting into the profits of slavery. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast. Even when tariff agitation was much stronger, in the 1820s and 30s, its practitioners were quite candid about it being entirely to secure the value and perpetuity of their slave property. r/AskReddit is the place to ask and answer thought-provoking questions. THAT’S what makes this issue so interesting to discuss, because at the foundation, the American Civil War was a struggle over slavery, and whether it would continue or start its slow death in this country.