From Condemnation to Accommodation: Changing American Perspectives on Slavery and the
Creation of a Unified National Narrative through Textbooks, 1890-1940
Jason Schumacher
December 18 2009
American History Research Seminar
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Introduction
In 1894, a Tennessee primary school student protested the teaching of a Northernoriented textbook by burning it, spurring others to follow suit. When asked why she did it, she
answered that “it made the Yankees win all the battles.”1 Her action was the manifestation of her
belief that the interpretation of history presented in the textbook was a bold-faced lie.2
This story of burning a seemingly Northern-focused text is a living manifestation of the
power that ideas can have on individuals. Ideas, in this sense, can be as powerful as a ball from a
musket or a bomb from an airplane. One can potentially enact more change by burning a book
with which one does not agree than through the violence of warfare. This is especially true when
it comes to thinking about the Civil War because of the ways in which different historical
interpretations can condemn or uplift one’s own sense of self as an heir of a proud Southern
tradition. The student who burned her textbook in 1894 was responding to a contentious, but
understandable, impulse to see oneself and tradition in the best possible light.
Because of the great potential power of ideas for action, they cannot be underestimated
when it comes to the heated memory of the American Civil War. Since the outbreak of the war,
individuals have held countervailing interpretations of why the war started, what purpose the war
served, and whether the North or the South was morally culpable for one of the bloodiest wars in
American history.
Starting in the early 1900s, many Southern states began to take action in order to better
portray their viewpoint of the Civil War by implementing legislation that called for consistent
textbook adoption according to a number of criteria. These criteria focused on the desire to
James M. McPherson, “Long-Legged Yankee Lies: The Southern Textbook Crusade,” in The Memory of
the Civil War in American Culture, Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004): 71.
2
McPherson, 71.
1
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prevent the dissemination of “partial or partisan” books, eschewing what Southern critics
considered a Northern approach to history. Instead, they sought to favor of a more Southerncentric view that emphasized the virtues of the region.3 In turn, this power of textbook selection
gave the Southern critics power and leverage against the Northern textbook industry, leading to
historical reconsideration based on factors not directly affected by historiography.
Southerners were motivated by their desire to see the textbooks that were teaching their
children reflect their own values, beliefs, and interpretations of past events. Just as people’s
opinions change when faced with new evidence, so do their views of history. New evidence, or
new ways of looking at past events, is very much impacted by present condition, and thus
historical knowledge is very much subject to the milieu of the times in which it was generated.
Consequently, historical interpretations can be used as a lens to examine the era in which it was
generated in order to derive some larger meaning or purpose.
Antebellum Southern slavery has long been a point of contention in the United States,
making it an ideal subject to study changing historical interpretations. Existing in a vague,
pseudo-accepted state for most of the 18th and 19th centuries, slavery was abolished as a result
of the Civil War. However, remnants of the institution, as well as its memory, lived on. The
memory of slavery took hold in textbooks written in the late 19th century and beyond. However,
much as the role of slavery was contested when it was an active institution in the United States,
so was it contested in the histories written about slavery and the slaveholders who perpetuated it.
Textbooks from the 1890s and 1900s possessed two different types of narratives. These
narratives were separated geographically and sectionally, with the Northern narratives portraying
a pro-Union, anti-slavery perspective. The Southern narratives, however, focused on creating a
Southern national identity, yet conformed to the Northern narrative by overtly denouncing
3
McPherson, 71.
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slavery. By the 1930s, however, textbook narratives had converged in form, and omitted
discussing slavery in negative terms. In this paper, I will look at these two different eras through
textbooks published during these time periods. Within these periods, I will analyze the textbooks
within the context of historical memory, a conceptual tool I detail in the first section of my
paper. I will culminate my paper with a discussion of the significance of this analysis.
It is my thesis that textbooks from the early era of my study (1890-1910) condemned
slavery on moral terms, but portrayed different historical memories when it came to other issues.
The moral condemnation of slavery vanished from textbooks by the 1930s, replaced with a more
unified national narrative that attempted to bring together the differing historical memories
present in the North and the South in an attempt to treat them as equal members within the
United States. Additionally, this emerging unified national narrative in the 1930s did not
condemn slavery, and in many cases, justified its past practice.
Conception of Historical Memory
Historical textbooks reflect more than just the viewpoint of the author. We must assume
that each textbook, even if only sparsely adopted, was read by many young students, and that to
some degree, the omniscient voice of the author affected the student’s perception and belief
about the world around him or herself. Because of the potential for textbooks to reach and affect
the perceptions of the young, these sources are especially apt at examining ideas of national
character and ideology.
Within the last twenty years, historians have begun to more commonly examine ideas of
historical memory, or in other words, the sense people have of their historical heritage. Put most
simply, studying historical memory means studying people’s intuitive reaction to a historical
topic. For example, the phrase Civil War would likely nowadays immediately evoke the thought
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of slavery (or, perhaps, states’ rights!) prior to any sort of deeper thought. In a more complicated
sense, historical memory is the construction of a popular and not necessarily objective narrative
in which personal experience and thoughts play more significance than they would in a formal
study of history.4
In the context of the early 20th century, the historical memory people possessed was
especially important. Civil War historian David W. Blight argues that “a segregated society
required a segregated historical memory and a national mythology that could blunt or contain the
conflict at the root of that segregation.”5 In a period in which history was seen to have simply
existed without the interpretive voice of the narrator, segregated historical memory, and
consequently, national mythologies, textbooks played a more influential role in the development
of thought.6
My method of analyzing the content of textbooks that subsequently influenced thought is
found in a fusion of three of the works within the historiography of historical memory. While all
of the following historians share much in common in considering what it means to have
4
This section of my research addresses the claims of three of the most influential arguments in forming my
understanding of historical memory. However, there are a number of other works that were instrumental to my
research, as well. Kyle Ward’s History in the Making: An Absorbing Look at How American History Has Changed
In the Telling over the Last 200 Years (New York: The New Press, 2006) is a similar piece of research to my own in
that he detailed countless American history textbooks and looked at the changing interpretations. However, he did
not advance a disputable claim in his work. Frances FitzGerald’s America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the
Twentieth Century (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1979) focuses on the 1960s as a critical moment in
American education history because of fundamental changes to textbooks and Joseph Moreau’s response,
Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2003) is a response to this work. Ellen Fitzpatrick’s History’s Memory: Writing
America’s Past, 1880-1980 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002) addresses changing narratives and
methodologies in professional histories, but is primarily a text in line with those dealing with history as a profession,
such as Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
5
David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2001), 391.
6
Jim Cullen, The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past (Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1995), 21-28. In this section, Cullen identifies the core of the historical profession as beginning in the late
19th century, but that professional historians using professional methodologies did not take prominence until World
War II.
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knowledge of historical memory, they each contribute a unique element to my methodological
pool.
Historian David Glassberg addresses what he calls a “sense of history” that “is not based
in physiology like a sense of smell or sight.”7 Instead, a sense of history is “a perspective on the
past at the core of who they are and the people and places they care about.”8 By defining the
sense of history as a personal, deep seated sense, he reserves the sense of history to nonprofessional historians; or at the very least, a past event, place, or person not critically analyzed,
but taken at face value. Glassberg admits that much of public history has the potential to become
a sense of history, whether in the form of “public histories through schools, museums,
monuments, and civic celebrations.”9 However, he admits that just as a sense of history can be
studied as coming from a variety of places, it can be analyzed with a variety of different
methodologies, as opposed to just studying autobiographies.10 He emphasizes the political and
social methodologies, but leaves the door open for others as well.
Blight, in Race and Reunion, speaks with a more scornful tone than Glassberg of nonprofessional interpretations of history. The work centers around “the ways that contending
memories clashed or intermingled in public memory, and not in a developing professional
historiography of the Civil War,” with Blight identifying the second Ku Klux Klan as some of
the results of untrained historical narratives.11
This exclusivity of historical memory, though, acts against a common understanding.
Historian of popular culture and memory Jim Cullen criticizes Blight for this, saying that ”if
7
David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2001), 7.
8
Glassberg, 6.
9
Glassberg, 7.
10
Glassberg, 9.
11
Blight, Race and Reunion 1-2, 394.
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there is anything unsatisfying about what Blight is doing here, it is less about what he says than
how he says it. Even more than other kinds of historical writing, memory bears a special
relationship to addressing—and redressing—contemporary common sense.”12 He also questions
“whether [Blight’s] approach, so deeply invested in the norms of academic history, can reach
beyond the people who need least convincing.”13 Cullen’s critique centers on Blight’s exclusion
of anyone not a professional historian from contributing to any sort of critical understanding of
history. Indeed, Cullen goes as far to hint that people involved in forming historical memory
should be exposed to accessible scholarship detailing the potential effects of historical memory.
While his view of the power granted by historical memory is consistent with Glassberg’s,
Blight’s view is much more pessimistic about who can participate in interpreting and
experiencing historical memory.
Historian Gavriel Rosenfeld provides an essential third element to mediate between
Glassberg and Blight’s interpretations of memory. Rosenfeld ties speculative fiction, such as
what would have happened if the South had won the Civil War, to the larger issues of historical
memory. Though this association, he argues that these “allohistorical narratives” that address
what could have been are inherently presentist and tell historians much more about the writer and
the writer’s context than the actual elements that led to the divergence between history and
speculative fiction.14 He uses the examples of nightmare and fantasy scenarios, which affirm the
morality of the present and idolize the past, respectively.
Rosenfeld’s ideas on speculative history allow us to better analyze historical memory by
assuming that the fears or desires expressed in historical memory actually represent a critique of
12
Jim Cullen, review of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Culture, by David W. Blight,
American Historical Review 107, no. 1 (2002): 204.
13
Cullen, 204
14
Rosenfeld, 90.
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the present. Whereas Glassberg and Blight deal with historical memory as a personal aspect with
some effect on society, Rosenfeld adds the ability to examine individuals expressing a specific
strain of historical memory as critics of the world in which they lived. In this way, “fantasy and
nightmare scenarios … have different political implications.” 15 By differentiating the two, an
author using this framework can make much fuller interpretations of manifestations of historical
memory, which are alternate histories in themselves.
Out of these three main ideas on historical memory comes the most useful way of
examining textbooks that concern themselves with slavery during the Civil War. Glassberg’s
framework concerns the intuitive, guttural idea of history that people have when confronted with
a topic they have not heavily questioned. Blight’s idea of historical memory contributes the idea
that historical memory is often, in many ways, ahistorical. However, Rosenfeld excuses the
ahistoricality of narratives within historical memory, saying that it is acceptable if historical
memory is not especially accurate, because their perception of history tells us more about them
than actual past events. These three viewpoints, combined together, define historical memory to
be a deep-seated reaction, often ahistorical and flawed, but imminently useful in revealing
information about the one possessing any particular strand of historical memory. It is through
this framework I will look at arguments in textbooks concerning antebellum American slavery.
Pre-World War I Textbooks
There were two general countervailing narratives present in the late 19th and early 20th
century textbooks. One, the dominant Northern narrative, presented what we would consider a
conventional viewpoint when it came to the primary cause of the Civil War—that is, an
interpretation that foregrounded slavery. Southern narratives, however, eschewed the popular
15
Rosenfeld, 93.
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Northern sentiment and instead showed the South in the best possible light, which meant arguing
that the Civil War was fought primarily over the issue of states’ rights.16
Differing Sectional Views on States’ Rights
The Southern textbooks’ focus on states’ rights as the originating cause of the Civil War
was a strong and overt denial of the more popular assertion that slavery was the progenitor of the
Civil War. Susan Pendleton Lee, Southern textbook author of Lee’s Advanced School History of
the United States argued that the Civil War was “not [fought] to preserve slavery.” 17 This
element was fundamental to the idea of states’ rights. Lee defended her states’ rights argument
by citing the supposed constitutional right to secede, but more unusually, also presented a
nuanced view of the Civil War by arguing how other nations evaluated the debate over slavery or
states’ rights. Lee argued that upper classes in Britain “applauded the seceders [sic] and
professed to believe that slavery was not the real cause of the war.” 18 Lee’s historical memory
drew upon internal American sources as well as the external to support her argument in the
critical debate over Civil War causation.
Other Southern authors supported Lee’s argument for states’ rights being the leading
cause of the Civil War. In Lawton Evans’ 1909 work, The Essential Facts of American History, a
similar argument emerged. Evans cited Daniel Webster for a concise summary of the Southern
position—“a bargain cannot be broke on one side and still bind the other side.”19 Despite the lack
of outside corroboration, such as that which Lee presented, Evans believed this to be enough to
16
As the publishing industry was (and still is) concentrated in the North, the publisher is not enough
information to determine whether a narrative can be classified as belonging to the Northern or Southern tradition.
Instead, to determine which books could be deemed Southern narratives and which could be considered Northern, I
drew upon the author’s credentials and place of employment.
17
Susan Pendleton Lee, Lee’s Advanced School History of the United States (Richmond: B.F. Johnson
Publishing Company, 1899), 360, capitalized in original.
18
Fiske, 374-75
19
Lawton B. Evans, The Essential Facts of American History (Boston: Benj. H. Sanborn and Co., 1909),
363.
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determine the case closed. Because “all the states had entered the Union of their own free will,”
Evans saw no prohibition when it came to dissolving the agreement that bound the states
together.20
Universal Moral Evils of Slavery
Just as strongly as Southern narratives attempted to identify states’ rights as the cause of
the Civil War did the Northern works emphasize slavery’s role in the origin of the conflict.
Alexander Johnston, author of A History of the United States for Schools, argued that prior to the
start of violence, “every one [sic] could see that there were signs of terrible danger to the
country, though no one could see exactly from what quarter the danger was to come.”21 Despite
the ambiguity of Johnston’s danger, he also spoke of the past divisive dangers of slavery that
“split the great religious denominations” and defied “the will of the people.”22 Even if he did not
state that slavery was the cause of the Civil War overtly, he implicitly identified not just the evil
of slavery, but its ability to split parts of a whole, such as the United States.
Northern textbook authors did not just affirm slavery as the cause of the Civil War, but
they denounced the Southern counterargument as well. John Fiske, author of an identically
named book, A History of the United States for Schools, indicted the implementation of states’
rights in defense of Southern principles, but not their theoretical principle. In his argument, Fiske
acknowledged in passing that “the disputes over slavery … led to the Civil War,”23 but spent
significantly more time asking that
no true American belittle States’ Rights. It is true that before the war, for years, the term
was identified with State Sovereignty, and in common parlance it referred to but one
supposed right of the States—the right of secession. The term was abused and misused
20
Evans, 363.
Alexander Johnston, A History of the United States for Schools (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1985), 274.
22
Johnston, 274.
23
John Fiske, A History of the United States for Schools (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1899), 349
21
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until it almost became an offence to the honest, patriotic citizen; but that time is past, the
bone of contention is removed, and the States have again resumed their normal position
in the great structure of National Government.24
Fiske’s interpretation allowed the Northerners to rehabilitate figures such as Daniel Webster for
their own purposes by explaining the inappropriate implementation of the states’ rights argument
in the case of the Civil War. For Fiske, rehabilitating appropriated figures and countering
Southern arguments was more important than actually proving that slavery was the cause of the
war.
Despite the differences between Northern and Southern narratives when it came to the
general portrayal of the North and the South, as well as the different proposed causes of war, the
differing narratives agreed on the critical point that slavery was a moral evil. While the Southern
narratives may have made this statement out of political pragmatism and did not mean to extend
contemporary concessions based on the statement, this was a unifying point of the sectional
narratives.
Textbooks converged on economic discussions of slavery to convey a moral argument
through such a discussion. Elson wrote that Southerners “all agree that since the South is far
more prosperous since the curse of slavery has been removed.”25 In a less sympathetic way,
Johnston said that “slaves worked only because they were made to do so; they worked slowly,
carelessly, and stupidly.”26 Despite this harsh portrayal of slaves under slavery, he identified that
“the real reason for the backwardness of the South” was “there was no great number of person
who really wanted to work.”27 In this was an implicit critique of Southern plantation owners and
other whites who relied on the labor of others. While not directly attacking the morals of slavery,
24
Fiske, 384.
Henry W. Elson, Side Lights on American History (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 292.
26
Alexander Johnston, A History of the United States for Schools (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1985), 287.
27
Johnston, 287.
25
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these textbooks argued the economic evils of slavery, for African and Anglo-Americans alike.
The implication of economic-based arguments is that once and if economic barriers were
removed, everyone would have similar potentials for labor.
The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was a topic that provoked significant moral discussion
within late 19th and early 20th century textbooks. The Fugitive Slave Law itself was a
controversial compromise at the time as a tenuous attempt to keep the country together. It
required Northern officials to take an active role in assisting Southern slaveholders recover their
slaves if they escaped to the North. Prior to 1850, the burden on Northerners to help recover
escaped slaves was much less onerous. It was not the extra burden on Northerners to which
textbooks objected, though—it was the morality of making the North complacent with the sins of
the South. Most concisely, Henry Elson, author of the Northern-focused text Side Lights on
American History, wrote that “the Fugitive Slave Law was inhuman and unjust.”28 However, he
did not restrict his analysis to the law itself, and tried to extend his argument to individuals
responsible for its creation. “President Millard Fillmore, on September 18, 1850, signed the
Fugitive Slave Law, and by this act … he covered his name with dishonor,” Fiske wrote. He then
condemned the former president for his complacency for an extension of policies enforcing
slavery.29 Despite indicting Fillmore, “the South as a whole cannot be said to have been
responsible for this [fugitive slave] inhuman law.”30 Elson did not consider the South a
homogeneous mass to be universally condemned, but instead that the Fugitive Slave Law was
the product of a group within the South, that the law “was forced upon the country by a class of
slaveholders.”31 By acknowledging that not the entire South was necessarily complacent in
28
Elson, 267.
Elson, 266.
30
Elson, 266.
31
Elson, 265.
29
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maintaining slavery, Elson foreshadowed later developments within the textbook genre and the
ways in which the North and the South would come together to form a unified narrative.
Lee also hinted at the possibility of a unified American narrative by conceding that
slavery was morally condemnable, even if it had not been the cause of the Civil War. This
unification, though, started with the moral aspect of slavery itself. She made explicit that she was
“not apologizing for slavery nor defending it.”32 Instead, she framed her textbook as “telling you
how the noble-minded, patriotic, religious people of the South looked on [slavery] in 1861.”33
Despite being marketed to a Southern audience in both its author and its content, Lee did not
glorify slavery, at least not overtly. What she did, though, is elevate Southerners as a people in
the eyes of others. For her, Southerners in the late 19th century should not have been bound to
the sins of their forefathers, evoking an early anti-presentist argument. In a sense, Lee argued
that Southerners could not be judged for their pasts by the values of the present. While this
defense against presentism took but two sentences to describe, its power created the ability for
Southerners to cast off the burden of slavery and to be proud of their heritage.
While Northern and Southern textbooks in the late 19th century and early 20th century
disagreed on the cause of the Civil War, they agreed that slavery was a moral evil. Whether they
romanticized or demonized the South itself, textbook authors believed that “the South is to be
congratulated on the results of the Civil War.”34 Despite the countervailing interpretations in
textbooks, the authors nonetheless felt that since the removal of slavery, “no section of our
country has brighter prospects than the sunny South,” in economic and social terms.35 Authors of
these narratives looked to the future as a way to escape from their personal and dark past.
32
Lee, 359.
Lee, 359.
34
Elson, 292.
35
Elson, 292.
33
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Post-World War I Textbooks
Whereas pre-World War I textbooks embodied competing national narratives, those
published in the 1930s adopted a more unified national story. Unlike the pre-World War I
narratives which contained separate North and South nationalistic components, textbooks printed
after 1930 had a much more consistent narrative and moral structure. Whereas pre-World War I
texts were unified in their denunciation of slavery, the similarities in the later texts were farther
reaching. Additionally, compared to the earlier texts, these devoted less discussion to slavery
itself, or did not portray it in moral terms.
These post-1920s texts converged on three main themes when it came to slavery: that the
actual bondage of slavery was not especially onerous, that not many southerners were actually
slaveholders, and that abolitionists hurt the anti-slavery cause more than they helped it. These
themes were not the exclusive points of convergence concerning slavery in post-1920 textbooks,
but they are the most lucid in demonstrating a similar textual convergence not present in earlier
works.36
Nature of Slaveholding
For textbook authors in the 1930s and 40s, slave life was, for the most part, an agreeable
circumstance. Justifying slavery in the greater national narrative would go great lengths to merge
the previously existing national narratives, especially if other aspects were kept in place. Authors
wrote of slavery in terms of reciprocal cooperation and mutual interest on the part of the
slaveholders and the slaves themselves, not unlike a business arrangement. Thomas Marshall,
author of American History, argued that slavery itself was not cruel to those bound by it. Despite
36
Of course, there are also places of divergence within these texts. In no way are the post-1920 texts
unified in all of their points or perspectives. However, this is to be expected in any textual comparison, regardless of
whether they preach the same overarching message, which I argue these texts do, at least when it comes to slavery.
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being a slave, “the negro of plantation days was usually happy.”37 Further, “[the slave] was fond
of the company of others and liked to sing, dance, crack jokes, and laugh; he admired bright
colors and was proud to wear a red or yellow bandana.”38 While seemingly superficial elements,
Marshall argued that they were indicative of someone content in his or her situation, and that if
slaves were content in their state, slavery could not have been as cruel an institution as it had
been previously perceived.
Not only did textbook authors see slaves as happy, or at the very least content, but they
also argued that slaveholders and overseers were kind to those they held in bondage. Planters
themselves, if even if not charitable people, found that “not the whip, but loyalty, based on pride,
kindness, and rewards, brought the best returns.”39 This meant that fear, represented by the whip,
was something only used by the inferior slaveholders, while the competent ones coexisted with
his slaves in harmony. Authors also articulated the perceived burden on slaveholders. In addition
to instructing “their overseers to look after the well-being of the slaves” for the benefit of labor,
slaveholders also saw “that the slave quarters were kept clean, that the food and clothing were
sufficient, and that the sick were given attention.”40 This depicted relationship placed slaves as
the recipients of the beneficence of southern slaveholders.
The good life of the slave was further depicted in the slave-slaveholder relationship
following the Civil War. Having lived a good life with his or her slaveholder, Wertenbaker
argued that slaves were hesitant to give up the relationship with which both slave and
slaveholder were comfortable. Following the Civil War,
many a white-haired planter called his slaves around him to tell them of their freedom.
They came always respectfully, hat in hand, crowding around the front portico … ‘you
37
Thomas Marshall, American History (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 342.
Marshall, 342.
39
Marshall, 342.
40
Marshall, 342.
38
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are now free,’ said the master, ‘and you may go if you please, or if you wish you may
stay with me and work for a share of the crop.’ ‘Yes, master,’ was the usual reply, ‘we
want to stay right here with you.’41
By arguing that African-Americans wanted to stay with their former masters, Wertenbaker
attacked the very definition of slavery as an involuntary institution. Taken further, it was the
motivation and consent of slaves that enabled the institution of slavery, creating a nostalgic
image of harmony between working slaves and heartfelt masters.
This nostalgic sense of slave-slaveholder cooperation was further reflected in the
imperialist arguments Adams made, which centered on African-Americans being better off in
America in any shape or form than still in Africa. Adams argued that even if being held as a
slave was a terrible state, that “America has done an immense lot for the descendants of the
original slaves.”42 This apologist attitude served to frame slavery in terms of a scale of what
might have been were slaves not to be taken in the first place. Posed in the hypothetical, Adams
asked:
Would the 12,000,000 of Negroes in the United States today prefer that their ancestors
had never been enslaved, and that they had themselves, if alive, should at this moment be
living as savages or barbarians in the African Jungle? Would a Du Bois prefer to be
headman to an African chief instead of a Harvard graduate, scholar and writer?43
By asking these rhetorical questions, Adams cemented his view that no matter whether slavery
was a brutal institution, African-Americans were better off than they would have been if the
slave trade had not existed. In a larger sense, Adams’ allohistorical narrative showed the
acceptable costs of uplifting a population in the Western image. Yet, it is important to note that
41
Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, The United States of America: A History (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1933), 417.
42
James Truslow Adams, The American: The Making of a New Man (New York: Charles Scribners’s Sons,
1943), 129.
43
Adams, 128-29.
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this argument did not constitute a tacit acknowledgement of the evil of slavery; instead, it
preempted that potential counter-argument.
Adams went as far to accept contemporary inequality, but refused to place the blame on
slavery or the slave trade. In the 1940s world, he saw that “Harlem may not be Heaven but
almost no Negro yet who has been offered the chance has wanted to go back to Africa, [or] even
to Liberia.”44 By mentioning Liberia as well as Africa as a whole, Adams drew the scope of his
argument throughout time, back to the early 1800s when re-colonization of slaves in Liberia was
considered a realistic possibility. Even though “the African is the only race brought to America
against its will,” Adams showed that “it is also the only one which does not think of, or want to
return to, the ‘mother land,’ even for a visit.” 45 This, for textbook authors, indicated “something
decidedly significant,” something that indicated the moral righteousness of slavery at best, or the
acceptable trade of slavery for civilization at the worst.46
The Slaveholding Population
Even if readers disagreed with textbook authors that Southern slavery was largely
benevolent and that being in the civilized United States was a sufficient tradeoff to any offenses
suffered, these same authors defended the majority of the antebellum South from criticism. In
order to stave off such criticism, authors divorced the term slaveholder from Southerner while
rehabilitating and explaining away their actions. This way, even if readers were to believe that
slavery was a cruel, condemnable practice, very little of the Southern population actually
benefitted from its practice.
In its most simple form, authors such as Guitteau overtly stated that little of the South
benefitted from slavery. He argued that it was dangerous to think of the whole South as a
44
Adams, 129.
Adams, 129.
46
Adams, 129.
45
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slaveholding group, and that “only one third of the white population of the South owned
slaves.”47 While slavery was the lynchpin of the Southern economy, authors attempted to show
that holding slaves was not the defining factor of being a Southerner.
Marshall expanded on Guitteau’s argument by saying that not only were Southerners not
defined by slavery, but that the North and the South were often of similar minds on issues.
Surprisingly, this included, for a brief time, slavery. Marshall argued that “the antislavery
movement at first found many sympathizers in the South,” showing the similarities of the two
sections of the nation. 48 When dealing with the period of increasingly heightened tension
regarding slavery in the 1850s, textbook authors faulted not one section of the nation, but both.
Chapter subsection headings such as “Misrepresentation of Both Sides Hastens the Final
Break”49 were common, cementing the nation’s similarities, and not their differences.
The similarities between Northerners and Southerners were most apparent in a passage of
Adams’ work, identifying the ways in which individuals did not necessarily have to be either a
Southern slaveholder or Northern abolitionist. One notable individual, “[Robert E.] Lee, one of
the most high-minded of Americans, was not fighting to defend slavery as an institution, but his
state of Virginia,” Adams argued. 50 To serve as a counterpoint to Lee, Adams presented Ulysses
S. Grant, who “had owned slaves, but was fighting to preserve the Union.”51 In showing how
there were a “variety of opinions and emotions [in] both [the] North and South,” Adams created
similarities between Northerners and Southerners, whether based on slavery or not. 52
47
William Guitteau, The History of the United States: A Textbook for Secondary Schools (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1937),357.
48
Marshall, 389.
49
Wertenbaker, 375.
50
Adams, 335.
51
Adams, 335.
52
Adams, 335.
Schumacher 19
Given the similarities of Northerners and Southerners for which the authors argue, it
should be no surprise that textbook authors identified the different perspectives on slavery within
the South as an issue based in economics and class warfare. The rich Southern slaveholders were
“the great planters [and] the social leaders” of their communities, as well as “the political
leaders.” 53 This Southern aristocratic class was the group for which “slavery seemed necessary,”
not the majority of the Southern population.54
The majority population of the South who did not own slaves was depicted as being in a
quasi-slavery themselves. While they were not held in physical bondage as the AfricanAmerican slaves, they were held by a form of social slavery. Marshall claimed the nonslaveholding Southern whites
looked upon the large slaveowners with feelings of sullen envy; yet when election day
came, the whites who were without money and without slaves did the bidding of the lord
of the plantation. The slaveholders took the political offices; the man who worked with
his hands was seldom chosen to represent the South in the halls of Congress. The
Southern political system was really a government of the few, maintained by and for the
slaveholders.55
By comparing slaves to poor Southern whites, Marshall and other authors who used similar
rhetorical strategies attempted to dispel the idea that slavery was isolated to African-Americans.
Marshall’s narrative, in effect, made it possible for Americans to conceptualize anyone as a
victim, regardless of their social class or color of their skin. If this were true to the audience,
textbook authors would have achieved their goal of diffusing the idea of slavery to the point
where it was a meaningless social condition that anyone could experience, regardless of whether
they were bound to any particular master.
53
Marshall, 343.
Marshall, 343.
55
Guitteau, 398.
54
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Radical and Untenable Abolitionists
To further moderate the idea of slavery, post-1930s textbook authors argued that
abolitionists were too radical in their actions and just as dangerous as slaveholders themselves.
The danger from abolitionists stemmed from their inability to compromise or understand any
other position held in the middle of the 19th century. In other words, textbook authors saw the
abolitionists as being political extremists, unwilling to compromise on the smallest points that
would allow them to implement change. By undermining abolitionists, textbook authors gave the
antebellum South less opposition to their slaveholding cause than if abolitionists were considered
reasonable social critics.
Abolitionists, then, were framed in the most exclusionary way possible. They denounced
the South, yet were too extreme for the North, according to 1930s textbooks. Whereas “on the
whole the country seemed pleased with the result [of the Compromise of 1850],” abolitionists
were not.56 While Americans as a whole—not just Northerners or Southerners—were able to
come together for the common goal of compromise, abolitionists did not fall into this broad,
inclusionary category. By not fitting the category of part of this complete America, Guitteau and
his contemporaries cast the abolitionists out of the American mould.
Figures such as William Lloyd Garrison were universally portrayed in a negative light,
attracting the scorn of both the North and the South. Radicalism on the slavery issue, textbook
authors argued, was an unproductive use of energy. Garrison possessed a “radical stand” on the
topic of slavery, and this stand “alienated the sympathy of most business men in the north. They
resented his intemperate abuse of Southern slaveholders, and his constant efforts to stir up
trouble.”57 If Garrison offended the North’s sensibilities because of his heckling, his trespasses
56
57
Guitteau, 365.
Wertenbaker, 317.
Schumacher 21
against the South were much more severe. Marshall showed that Garrison attacked “the pride of
the South,” which hit deep at the Southern soul and consequently “made the name of Garrison
hated more than that of any other abolitionist.”58 These accounts of Garrison placed him as
attacking the South as a whole, as opposed to being an anti-slavery advocate. In the estimation of
those reading textbooks produced in the 1930s, William Lloyd Garrison must have been seen as
just an angry man, insistent upon insulting the honor and pride of those who might help him with
his goals.
Garrison was not the only abolitionist to suffer the heavy-handed judgment of 1930s
textbook authors. John Brown, most famously known for his raid on the Harper’s Ferry armory
and subsequent failed incitement of a slave uprising, was branded as a “misguided fanatic” who
“hasten[ed] the crisis” towards civil war.59 Brown suffered the same exclusionary treatment as
Garrison, facing the unified scorn of both the North and South. Guitteau spoke of the unified
condemnation of Brown and his accomplices, showing that “Northern sentiment condemned
Brown and his act of folly.”60 While he did make an allowance for other abolitionists, saying that
they did not condemn Brown for his actions, this only further served to exclude abolitionists
from being included in Guitteau’s definition of who was part of this unified America.
Evidentiary Explanation
The moral condemnation of slavery in turn of the century textbooks gave way to the
unified narratives of the 1930s and 40s that eschewed a moral denunciation of slavery in order to
appeal to a broader audience. Narratives such as Lee’s were inherently limited in scope, but they
represented the Southern viewpoint. While they grudgingly conceded the common conception of
slavery as a moral evil in the 1890s, narratives such as Elson’s Side Lights on American History
58
Marshall, 387.
Wertenbaker, 376.
60
Guitteau, 384.
59
Schumacher 22
and Lee’s Lee’s Advanced History for Schools had distinct foci and reflected different
viewpoints on other issues.
This was not the case in the later textbooks. These narratives were greatly unified in form
and content, and did not concede that slavery was a moral evil. Instead, they rehabilitated the
practice of slavery by focusing on its merits, the foolhardy way in which abolitionists denounced
it, and the allohistorical question of how well off African-Americans might be were it not for the
American slave trade in the first place.
The extension of how textbooks changed over time is why this change happened. Yet,
questions regarding causation are much more difficult to answer in any authoritative sense.
Given this, I speculate that these changes occurred, at least in part, due to the increasing
reconciliation efforts between the North and the South regarding the Civil War. However, before
anyone can make a strong claim on causality, additional research must be conducted to
investigate all possible explanations and evaluate the legitimacy of each potential causal
scenario.
The unity of Northern and Southern narratives in textbooks from the 1930s and early
1940s represented the creation of one, uniquely American, national narrative. The sectional
differences of the 1890s and 1900s had vanished, or at least subsided. Instead of focusing on a
particular region, the later texts incorporated a more moderate approach, excluding extreme
points of view, such as an overt support for Southern nationalism or denouncing the moral aspect
of slavery. Instead, these aspects were downplayed or eliminated. By glossing over the battles
concerning slavery in American history, these later textbooks created a story that was tenable to
both North and South readerships that defined all citizens first and foremost as Americans, and
not Northerners or Southerners. Because of the “white Southern support for the war,” African-
Schumacher 23
Americans knew that the “consequences did not bode well for them.”61 White Southern support
meant fewer critiques of the South, and less severe ones when these critiques existed.
Lessening critiques of the South came about in American culture due to, in part, the
efforts of veterans’ associations that campaigned for thinking of the Civil War as something to
be remembered as uniquely American, and battles such as Gettysburg “as an ‘American’
victory.”62 This new way of thinking about the Civil War placed all veterans in a positive light,
regardless of whether they fought for the North or the South. These efforts, which led to
sympathy for “Southern views on blacks,” became systemic and “prevented [African-Americans]
from taking part in the healing process” of reconciliation by ignoring “the history of black
Americans.”63 As Blight argues, “how could they [Americans] have reunion and still deal with
race?”64 The short answer, and the answer for which history textbooks defend, is that Americans
pushed racial issues, including a negative conceptualization of slavery and its practices, out of
the public sphere and out of textbooks.
This exclusion can be explained by the impact countervailing historical memories
regarding slavery had on textbooks. As instructional tools intending to create a sense of identity
in those who read them, the presence of multiple national narratives threatened to undermine the
authority of history as a set of fixed events in the past. Contention within the early period
narratives, then, would have impacted the nation-building aspect of textbooks, and how readers
saw themselves as part of a larger whole as citizens of the United States.
Patching the wounded elements of the country—the North and the South—was an
essential component to unifying Americans’ historical memory and conception of the Civil War.
61
Blight, Race and Reunion, 352.
Edward Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), 90.
63
Linenthal, 91.
64
Blight, Race and Reunion, 340.
62
Schumacher 24
North and South reconciliation efforts hit full stride by 1911 with the 50th anniversary of the
Civil War. At a Gettysburg reunion in July 1913, “over fifty-five thousand Union and
Confederate veterans came to Gettysburg for a four-day celebration” of the Civil War.65 Veterans
of the Battle of Gettysburg met here to shake hands with former comrades and enemies alike,
with the intent on demolishing the historical barricades between the veterans. As much as this
reunion was to dispel past hatreds, it was also to create new mythologies, or memories, as to
what happened fifty years prior, and why veterans could come together at that point to shake
their former enemies’ hands.
Later, in 1938, Secretary of War Harry H. Woodring spoke at a later Gettysburg reunion
of the same relativistic values Susan Pendleton Lee had expressed forty year prior. He spoke of
the “principles that he [each soldier in the Civil War] sincerely believe to represent eternal truth,”
as just rationale for both sides to have fought in the Civil War.66 This proto-postmodern
perspective represents the same change seen in textbooks, a change predicated upon
understanding the past by the rules its denizens supposedly held true. Woodring’s perspective
represented the strand of memory that took root in American textbooks at the same time, one
which sought to include as many Americans as possible while excluding the fewest.
However, this change in memory happened earlier than the 1930s. As soon as
reconciliation efforts began, so did reinterpretations of history and changes in historical memory.
This new strand of historical memory took hold and supplanted previous conceptions of the past,
according to the textbook textual evidence. Whether coincidental or not, the 1930s would have
been the point at which most Civil War veterans would have expired, and would have no longer
65
66
Linenthal, 95.
Linenthal, 97.
Schumacher 25
had a say about what they had experienced. This status of a war in which no one alive had fought
facilitated the development of a different sense of history.
Conclusion
As the fires of the Civil War were extinguished by the reconciliation of the North and the
South, so were finished the denunciations of slavery as a moral evil. National unity and a
national narrative were created with the lifeblood of the legacy of abolitionism. While this form
of historical memory might be scarcely important on an individual basis, the power of texts, the
power of an authoritative figure or book on those who may not be able to ask the right questions
is very powerful indeed.
The Civil War has become a critical element to American national identity, and as long as
this remains the case, the battle over its memory will likely continue. The female student who
burned her textbook in 1894 would have likely been pleased with the eventual transformation of
textbooks into a more unified state. Tearing up her Northern-sympathizing textbook was a show
of power, one that manifested itself in insidious ways and subtly altered American thought on
slavery, and ultimately, the Civil War itself.
Battles over the memory of the Civil War have not stopped with the convergence of ideas
and acceptance of slavery present in the 1930s textbooks. Historians have most recently entered
the fray of battle over Ken Burns’ eleven hour television series The Civil War has to rebuke what
they see as an attack on the “nature and quality of the national or social memory, the vast
public’s knowledge and understanding of its past.”67 Burns’ account of the Civil War omitted
much of the modern scholarship of the Civil War in favor of a triumphal narrative of unification.
While historians appear bitter over the success of Burns’ account of the Civil War, main point of
67
David Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 211.
Schumacher 26
contention seems to be that Burns fails to make clear that his work pushed a specific thesis or
claim. By playing outside of the box of what is considered acceptable for professional historians,
historians see Burns as having done the same kind of work as a student who burns her books to
protest a narrative with which she did not agree.
As the study of historical memory argues, historical interpretations, flawed or not, can
reveal information about the interpreter. A meta-analysis of this text, for instance, might reveal
that concerns over historical interpretations and the power of ideas are not isolated to one
particular period in history, nor do they have to be confined to the past. Even in the abstract, the
power of misconception and the power of belief have the potential to affect great change, just as
they created a national narrative that omitted the contentious in favor of unity, regardless of the
social and moral cost.
Schumacher 27
Works Cited
Primary sources68
Johnston, Alexander. A History of the United States for Schools. New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1895.
Elson, Henry W. Side Lights on American History. New York: Macmillan, 1899.
Fiske, John. A History of the United States for Schools. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1899.
Lee, Susan Pendleton. Lee’s Advanced School History of the United States. Richmond, VA: B.F.
Johnson Publishing Company, 1899.
Evans, Lawton B. The Essential Facts of American History. Chicago: Benjamin H. Sanborn &
Co., 1909.
Fite, Emerson David. History of the United States. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1923.
Marshall, Thomas M. American History. New York: Macmillan, 1930.
Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson and Donald E. Smith. The United States of America: A History.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933.
Guitteau, William Backus. The History of the United States: A Textbook for Secondary Schools.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1937.
Adams, James Truslow. The American: The Making of a New Man. New York: Charles
Scribners’s Sons, 1943.
68
Since my argument is predicated on a certain chronology, I have organized this section according to
publication date as opposed to the orthodox method of alphabetizing entries.
Schumacher 28
Secondary sources
Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2001.
Blight, David W. Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.
Fahs, Alice and Joan Waugh, eds. The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture. Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Glassberg, David. Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life. Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 2001.
Linenthal, Edward Tabor. Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields. Urbana: University
of Chicago Press, 1991.
Rosenfeld, Gavriel. “Why Do We Ask ‘What If?’: Reflections on the Function of Alternate
History.” History and Theory 41 (December 2002): 90-103.