The Race Card, circa 1871

As David Blight demonstrates, once Reconstruction had become a dead letter, it became politically inconvenient for both southern and northern whites to remember that the war had really been about slavery. Whites throughout the country were now okay with disenfranchising blacks and instating a slavery-lite sharecropping system, or at least they were unwilling to do anything about it. But if we were going back to a social system not so very far from the status quo ante bellum, why did over 600,000 people have to die? The circle could only be squared if whites in both sections now agreed that the late unpleasantness was “really” about states’ rights, and that since all were friends again now, who cared about black people? Northern and southern whites could embrace and forget their quarrels, while standing over the bodies of prostrate former slaves.

So it wasn’t just southern historians who perpetuated this myth. Northern elites were clearly complicit.

The South tended to be relatively good at elite higher education in the liberal arts, while the North was far better at mass literacy and technical education. For example, the Morrill Act for land-grant colleges that would teach practical things like agronomy didn’t pass Congress until most of the Southerners were gone in 1862.

Peter T,
Add Afghanistan traditions and Joan of Arc. (Let’s not forget Iphigenia.) The best blood to wave aloft is the blood of a virgin female.
Also, what Palindrome said.

Not to harp on you, Steve Sailer, but the South of the mid-19th C definitely did not have an advantage in elite education. Southern elites in the 1850s routinely complained that their children had to travel north for an education (and possibly anti-slavery indoctrination), which led to efforts to correct this perceived problem. There were fewer elite academies in the south in this period, and they were less prestigious than those found in New England. Susan Dunn wrote a great book about how Virginia (for example) fell behind during the decades from the revolution until the Civil War, and why efforts to reform the education system were unsuccessful.

“That is, it’s the original ‘playing the race card card’.”

Should read: “That is, it’s the original playing the ‘playing the race card’ card.”

?

I don’t think the South actually produced more historians than the north. It’s just that historians from the South wanted to do work on the Civil War and its aftermath — to vindicate their region’s honor –, while northern historians didn’t want to touch it, for reasons articulated by Palindrome. So we got nearly a century of white supremacist partisanship masquerading as unvarnished historical truth, much of which passed quietly into the conventional wisdom.

“Democrats would, therefore, need a stock term for that sort of unfair attack, condensing a sense of the fallacy of assuming nothing has changed, and doing double-duty as a fallacious excuse for ignoring present evidence that, indeed, nothing has changed. (As the man said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” If you have a personal interest in misunderstanding what he meant, I suggest you focus on ‘never’. That’s a fallacy! The Faulkner fallacy!)”

I have not heard of this blood shirt idea before.We did have a controversy last year where our hotheaded Prime Minister stated he would “shirtfront” Vladmir Putin at the G20 in Brisbane , happily no one got a bloody shirt because our Prime Minister had calmed down by then so his threat only lived to occasion some laughter.

Thinking to quite some time back in the days when I read a lot of Faulkner , I think you might consider The Unvanquished as an apposite text for this OP being about the civil war and immediate reconstruction period – there is the killing of “carpetbaggers” , and stolen election, and then Aunt Jenny and the son talk of “no bloody moon” as SPOILERS they move to stop the cycle of violence.

I looked for a relevant quote, and it is a very sad book I must say; I only read it the once then a friend’s dog ate it so I forgot just how sad it is til looking for a quote just now. I could not find such a pithy quote as above – this is from when the father (who has killed a lot including the “carpetbaggers” but becomes “tired of killing men, no matter what the necessity nor the end”) has been killed by his ex-rail-road-line partner (they both stand for the Legislature) and Ringo , the son’s African American boyhood friend /slave/”boy” (“They ain’t no more niggers, in Jefferson nor nowhere else… . This war ain’t over…. Used to be when you seed a Yankee you knower him… Now you don’t even know him and stir of the gun he got a clutch of this stuff in one hand and a clutch of nigger voting tickets in the yuther”), has just brought word to the household where the son/narrator is :

“We shook hands; I knew [Professor Wilkins] believed he was touching flesh which might not be alive tomorrow night and I thought for a second how if I told him what I was going to do, since we had talked about it, about how if there was anything at all in the Book, anything of hope and peace for His blind and bewildered spawn which he had chosen above all others to offer immortality, Thou shalt not kill must be it, since maybe he even believed he had taught it to me except that he had not, nobody had, not even myself since it went further than just having been learned. But I did not tell him. He was too old to be forced so, to condone even in principle such a decision; he was too old to have to stick to principle in the face of blood and raising and background, to be faced without warning and made to deliver like by a highwayman out of the dark : only the young could do that…”

I just heard Eric Foner on the radio today, and he relayed a marvelous quote by W.E.B. Du Bois about the writing of history in his day (1935):

“One fact and one alone explains the attitude of most recent writers of the history of Reconstruction; they cannot conceive Negroes as men … Suppose the slaves of 1860 had been white folk. … Ignorance and poverty would easily have been explained by history, and the demand for land and the franchise would have been justified as the birthright of natural free men!” [emphasis added]
-Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

Peter Novick’s “That Noble Dream” argues that after World War I, progressive “objective” historiography, as represented by the Beard’s “Rise of American Civilization” represented the US Civil War as an inevitable product of morally neutral social forces. From that perspective, moral appeals seemed beside the point, allowing a convergence in which progressive historiography could be used to “vindicate the Confederacy” (236).
I’m not a historian, so I’m able to judge Novick’s argument very well. But this odd convergence seems to me to explain some ways the Civil War continues to be misrepresented.

I was taught in my college American history course (way back in 1973) that, in some key ways, the South won the Civil War by framing the narrative. They foisted their opinion of themselves on the rest of us. Gone With The Wind is an example of that.

The South lost the war. The Yanks invaded and conquered it; that’s the narrative, that’s the context.

Compare to the Boer war. The Boers lost the war. But the British did spend some money on reconstruction, and they allowed the Boers local self-government, and in less than 50 years the Boers were pretty decisively running their country by themselves and for themselves.

One big difference was that in the Boer war both sides were careful not to arm blacks. Whoever won, after the war they didn’t want to deal with that problem.

And in the US South slavery was ended. To argue that they didn’t decisively lose you’d have to deny that was the main thing they were fighting for.

But in both cases after they lost the war, after awhile basicly the same people wound up running the conquered lands as before. It was different from, say, the Mongol invasions or the Norman Conquest.