territories,” being separate from them, so this paragraph confuses more than it
explains. Several other recent textbooks are equally confusing. Pathways to
the Present provides a box comparing “The Aims of the South” to “The Aims
of the North.” It quotes a House Resolution of July 25, 1861, to show that the
United States was fighting “to preserve the Union,” which was accurate at that
point in the war. (Ending slavery was not a war aim until 1863.) But its quote
for Southern war aims, drawn from Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address, says
only, “We have vainly endeavored to secure tranquility and obtain respect for
the rights which we were entitled.” What rights? Why did the South secede?
Pathways is silent. Boorstin and Kelley never discuss why the South seceded
at all, other than citing the trigger provided by the election of Lincoln. Why not
simply quote South Carolina’s “Declaration”? After all, South Carolina wrote
it precisely to “justify secession.”^19
Except for backsliding on slavery’s role underlying secession, most
textbooks now handle the topic with depth and understanding. Why did they
improve? To ask this is to engage in “historiography”—looking at the writing
of history. Who wrote this textbook? Of what background? To what audience?
When? Before the 1960s, publishers had been in thrall to the white South. In
the 1920s, Florida and other Southern states passed laws requiring “Securing a
Correct History of the U.S., Including a True and Correct History of the
Confederacy.”^20 Many states required textbooks to call the Civil War “the War
between the States,” as if no single nation had existed that secession had rent
apart. (I cannot find evidence that anyone called it “the War between the
States” while it was going on.)
In the fifteen years between 1955 and 1970, however, the civil rights
movement destroyed segregation as a formal system in America. The
movement did not succeed in transforming American race relations, but it did
help African Americans win more power. Today many school boards,
curricular committees, and high school history departments include African
Americans or white Americans who have cast off the ideology of white
supremacy. Thus when an account is written influences what is written.
Contemporary textbooks can now devote more space to the topic of slavery
and can use that space to give a more accurate portrayal.^21
Americans seem perpetually startled at slavery. Children are shocked to
learn that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Interpreters
at Colonial Williamsburg say that many visitors are surprised to learn that