Condemnation was meted out to Muzzey’s textbook because it was alleged that he said, “The cause for which the Confederate soldiers fought was an unworthy cause and should have been defeated,” and because “it is impossible for the student of history today to feel otherwise than that the cause for which the South fought was unworthy.”[496] Montgomery was placed in the objectionable group because he described the settlers of Georgia as “filthy, ragged, dirty prisoners taken from the ‘Debtor’s Prison’ by Oglethorpe.”[497]
On the other hand, R. G. Horton’s A Youth’s History of the Civil War presents a point of view acceptable to Miss Rutherford, for it declares that “the withdrawal of the Southern States from the Union was in no sense a declaration of war upon the Federal government but the Federal government declared war on them, as history will show.”[498]
Doubtless the most prejudiced discussion of mooted questions since the Civil War appears in the textbooks produced before the opening of the twentieth century. This period, in general, characterized by a spirit of intense local patriotism, reflected itself clearly in the history textbooks. During this period were published such Southern textbooks as Venable, A School History of the United States, Lee, New School History of the United States, Chambers, A School History of the United States, and Taylor, Model School History.
Susan Pendleton Lee’s New School History of the United States can be quoted as typical. “The Constitution of the United States recognized slavery.... The opinion that it was a moral wrong did not prevail before the days of Garrison and his followers who pronounced it to be the sum of all ‘iniquity.’... The outcry against slavery had made the Southern people study the subject, and they had reached the conclusion that the evils connected with it were less than those of any other system of labor. Hundreds of thousands of African savages had been Christianized under its influence. The kindest relations existed between the slaves and their owners.... The bondage in which the negroes were held was not thought a wrong to them, because they were better off than any other menial class in the world.”[499] The same author justified the Ku Klux Klan because “no high spirited, courageous people could patiently submit to such a government.” “As open resistance was impossible,” she declares, “they, too, had recourse to secret organizations. They were at first local, and were intended for self-protection against the barn burnings and worse outrages committed by misguided negroes.”[500]
As a result of this desire to present the history of their section in terms of their own convictions, the Southerners have always agitated for textbooks different from those used in Northern schools. Northern textbook companies whose enterprise was much condemned during the ante-bellum period have capitalized this sectional preference and produced for Southern consumption, among others, Evans’ The Essential Facts of American History, Chambers’ A School History of the United States, and Stephenson’s An American History.[501] On the other hand, for the North, the same book companies have published textbooks satisfactory to that section. Today, in substantially all of the states which formed the Confederacy, specific textbooks in American history are prescribed, a practice not so universal in the North, where local adoption is sometimes found.[502] An analysis of these Southern textbooks, however, discloses a very temperate presentation of controversial questions. Upon the points of contention between the North and the South, there is a natural bias in favor of the South, a tendency to attempt justification and exoneration. Evans, in The Essential Facts of American History, for example, in discussing “reasons for secession,” lays greater stress than the textbooks of the North on the right of secession, a “right which had been asserted by other than the Southern States.”[503] Stephenson, in An American History, dubs John Brown as “that terrible John Brown,”[504] and characterizes the carpet-bag governments as insolent, dishonest and violent.[505] The terms “rebellion” and “civil war” are employed by Northern, not Southern, histories, the “war of the states” and the “war of secession” being used in the South.
ATTEMPTS OF THE GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC TO CONTROL HISTORY TEXTBOOKS
Six years before the Confederate Veterans in reunion accepted the report of their first historical committee regarding the “false” histories used in Southern schools, the Grand Army of the Republic learned through a similar channel that the history textbooks of the North “signally” failed “to comprehend the causes that resulted in the war of the rebellion.”[506] Much cause for complaint arose from the fact that textbooks were “compiled for a national system of education, South as well as North,”—a condition held sadly unacceptable, it would seem, by the patriotic organizations of this period.[507]
In the Report of 1888, the G. A. R. undertook to point out statements in textbooks used in the South which appealed to them as indicative of “a thoroughly studied, rank, partisan system of sectional education.”[508] As a case in point Davidson’s School History of South Carolina, “published at Columbia, South Carolina, by one W. J. Duffie, copyrighted in 1869,” was examined. This history, so the Report declared, in Chapter 195 ascribed “the cause of secession, which was the cause of the war,” to the fact that “Congress kept passing laws which it had no right to pass according to the Constitution.”[509] Further, in speaking of the withdrawal of South Carolina from the Union the author asserted that “she had a right to do this; that is, if the States rights party of the South was correct in its doctrine.”[510]
The Report condemned another history textbook, written by Blackburn and McDonald, because of the following passage: “The second year of the war now commenced; it found each section preparing with terrible earnestness for the conflict. The South was straining every nerve to resist the Northern multitudes; ... To fill her armies the North had a better and more successful mode, she offered immense bounties and high pay. Induced by these, thousands of European mercenaries enlisted. The South had nothing but her gallant children to put in the field and thus she was condemned to stake her most precious jewels against the trash of Europe.”[511]
Other grounds for criticism were found in Alexander Stephens’ common school history which was guilty of an effort “to indoctrinate the youth” of the South with the “monstrous heresy” of state rights and secession.[512]