A revival of propaganda for sectional histories since 1921 is due in some degree to the appearance of two pamphlets which set forth the need of a distinct type of history for the South: The Truth of the War Conspiracy of 1861, by H. W. Johnstone, and Truths of History, by Mildred Lewis Rutherford, state historian for the United Daughters of the Confederacy. These pamphlets received the unanimous endorsement of the United Confederate Veterans at their meeting in Richmond, Virginia, June, 1922, in a resolution recommending their use in the public schools.[474] Among other things, these writings purported to establish the fact that Lincoln began the Civil War. The committee report declared: “This [The Truth of the War Conspiracy of 1861] presents the official evidence gathered principally from the United States Government archives, which proves the Confederate War was deliberately and personally conceived and its inauguration made by Abraham Lincoln, and that he was personally responsible for forcing the war upon the South.”[475]
The endorsement of this ultra-Southern viewpoint caused a storm of protest, particularly in the North. Under the caption “The Confederate Veterans’ New Glands,” the Chicago Daily Tribune observed: “We are moved to wonder, ‘What is history?’ The Standard Dictionary defines it as ‘a systematic record of past events.’ No better definition in six words occurs to us. But more or less recent events in world politics, coupled with the current action of the Confederate Veterans, indicates [sic] that that definition is in error. History is becoming, if it has not already reached that stage, a medium of propaganda. That became evident in the world war, when European histories were combed for evidence of the innate barbarity of the German people. It was more evident in the efforts to arouse the American people to the point of intervention and actual warfare to free Ireland. It is now emphasized through the efforts of the Confederate Veterans to impose upon the children of the south their own interpretation of the Civil War, regardless of accuracy or the effect upon the nation. The Veterans are attempting to pass on their old hates and rancors to their descendants. They have not yet surrendered to Grant. They are a trifle feeble, to be sure, but apparently becoming less so. They are busily engaged in swapping their old glands for new.”[476]
The New York Times expressed equally strong disapproval of an effort to revive the bitterness of the past and attempt “a revocation of beatification or canonization” of Lincoln.[477]
No less resentful at the attempted disparagement of Lincoln’s services were the officers of the Grand Army of the Republic, who assailed Miss Rutherford’s statement that Lincoln began the war as a “lie.”[478] Mrs. John A. Logan, representing the Dames of the Loyal Legion, also offered objections to such “a perversion of facts,” and declared that all patriotic societies would be urged to seek the suppression of any such histories.[479]
Protests against this revival of sectional animosity were not localized in the North. The Macon [Georgia] Telegraph suggested to Miss Rutherford that she would find better employment were she to bring to public view the virtues, the generosities and heroisms which were in the Old South and should be carried over in the New South. The Telegraph also believed that it would prove fruitful of good were she to dwell on the cordial tributes paid by the North to Lee as a man and as a general; and as for Lincoln, with much less research than she used in unearthing dubious evidences of his antagonism to the Southerners, she could find almost innumerable and indubitable proofs of his good-will. The Telegraph concluded that “the whole nation looks upon its Lincolns and its Lees as Americans, and humanity looks upon them as its own.”[480]
Beside the allegation that Lincoln began the Civil War, Miss Rutherford, following the impulse given her by the Johnstone pamphlet, Truths of the War Conspiracy of 1861,[481] offered quotations to show that Lincoln was not a fit example for children, nor was he given his rightful place in history. Such quotations as the following are indicative of the character of her remarks: “People found in Lincoln before his death nothing remarkably good or great, but on the contrary, found in him the reverse of goodness or greatness. Lincoln as one of Fame’s immortals does not appear in the Lincoln of 1861 (Schouler’s History of the United States, Vol. VI, p. 21).”[482] “Lincoln signed the liquor revenue bill and turned the saloon loose on the country, thus undoing the previous temperance work of the churches.”[483] “Mr. Lincoln went to church, but he went to mock and came away to mimic.”[484] “The people all drank, and Abe was for doing what the people did, right or wrong.”[485] Miss Rutherford also presented evidence designed to prove that Lincoln was a tricky politician,[486] and that the Emancipation Proclamation was unconstitutional.[487]
In contrast with these characterizations of Lincoln are the “spotless integrity, controlling conscience” and “sincere religious convictions” ascribed to Davis. Even a Northern historian, Ridpath, according to Miss Rutherford, testified that Davis had bitterness toward no man.[488]
Eighty-one per cent of the schools and colleges in the South, according to Miss Rutherford, were using, in 1921, “text-books untrue to the South,” and “seventeen per cent” were “using histories omitting most important facts concerning the South.”[489] As written, the histories “magnify and exalt the New England colonies and the Mayflower crew, with bare mention of the Jamestown Colony, thirteen years older, and the crews of the Susan Constant, the Discovery, and the Goodspeed.”[490] Other objectionable features in most school histories were the “extended account” generally given to the “religious faith and practice” of New England with no mention of Sir Thomas Dale’s Code in the Jamestown Colony, “which enforced daily attendance upon Divine worship, penalty for absence, penalty for blasphemy, penalty for speaking evil of the Church, and refusing to answer the Catechism, and for neglecting work.”[491]
Other Southerners than Miss Rutherford have criticized the customary presentation of history. “We owe it to our dead, to our living, and to our children, to preserve the truth and repel the falsehoods, so that we may secure just judgment from the only tribunal before which we may appear and be fully and fairly heard, and that tribunal is the bar of history,” asserted Benjamin H. Hill.[492] Likewise Thomas Nelson Page declared: “In a few years there will be no South to demand a history if we have history as it is now written. How do we stand today in the eyes of the world? We are esteemed ‘ignorant, illiterate, cruel, semi-barbarous, a race sunken in brutality and vice, a race of slave drivers who disrupted the Union in order to perpetuate human slavery and who as a people have contributed nothing to the advancement of mankind.’”[493]
Among the textbooks designated by Miss Rutherford for special criticism were Davidson’s History of the United States, Montgomery’s Beginner’s American History, and Muzzey’s An American History.[494] Davidson was criticized because he asserted that “the Jamestown colonists were vicious idlers and jail birds picked up on the streets of London,” and because of the statement that “side by side the two civilizations had grown up in America—the one dedicated to progress and kept up with the spirit of the age—the other a landed aristocracy with slavery as the chief excuse for its existence.”[495]