Lies My Teacher Told Me

cannot use our experiences during

and after the Civil War for the uplift

and enlightenment of mankind.

—W. E. B. DUBOIS^3

More Americans have learned the

story of the South during the years of

the Civil War and Reconstruction

from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With

the Wind than from all of the learned

volumes on this period.

—WARREN BECK AND MYLES CLOWERS^4

WHEN WAS THE COUNTRY we now know as the United States first settled?
If we forget the lesson of the last chapter for the moment—that Native
Americans settled—the best answer might be 1526. In the summer of that year,
five hundred Spaniards and one hundred black slaves founded a town perhaps
near the mouth of the Pee Dee River in present-day South Carolina. Disease
and disputes with nearby Indians caused many deaths in the early months of the
settlement. In November the slaves rebelled, killed some of their masters, and
escaped to the Indians. By then only 150 Spaniards survived; they retreated to
Haiti. The ex-slaves remained behind and probably merged with nearby Indian

nations.^5

This is cocktail-party trivia, I suppose. American history textbooks cannot
be faulted for not mentioning that the first non-Native settlers in the United
States were black. Educationally, however, the incident has its uses. It shows
that Africans (is it too early to call them African Americans?) rebelled against
slavery from the first. It points to the important subject of three-way race

relations—Indian-African-European—which most textbooks completely omit.^6
It teaches that slavery cannot readily survive without secure borders. And,
symbolically, it illustrates that African Americans, and the attendant subject of
black-white race relations, were part of American history from the first