
Texas students will soon learn slavery played a central role in the Civil War - ryan_j_naughton
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/16/668557179/texas-students-will-soon-learn-slavery-played-a-central-role-in-the-civil-war
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GhostVII
They already learned that slavery played a central role. They new changes are
going to have it listed as the only cause, rather than one of three causes.

~~~
gameswithgo
Do you have a source for your claim?

Slavery was the first order cause, so it would be correct to present slavery
as having a central role.

source: Texas Declaration of Secession: [http://www.civil-
war.net/pages/texas_declaration.asp](http://www.civil-
war.net/pages/texas_declaration.asp)

~~~
jjeaff
Wow, I had no idea they were so blatant about it. I thought it was all caped
in "state's rights" at the time. But right near the top:

"maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery - the
servitude of the African to the white race within her limits"

~~~
thechao
Texan here who was educated in the "state's rights" regime and had to learn
about the slavery 'angle' in college...

As opposed to most wars, where history was written by the victors, in the US
Civil War was mostly written about by the _losers_. They immediately went
about reinventing the war in order to ease their conscience. I mean, the South
deliberate started the war to defend an absolutely evil act (slavery), and in
the ensuing conflict brought utter ruin on their society. The North was
complicit in this rewriting because their main interest was in reintegration
and reunification of the country.

Unfortunately, fast forward 100+ years, and now we have people talking about
state's rights, and not about slavery. Counterrevisionism, in this case, is
more than justified.

~~~
kodablah
Also Texan, we learned slavery was the primary motivation and the discussion
concerning states rights was based on the outcome dovetailing into a pattern
of federalism henceforth.

~~~
cannonedhamster
Weird, married a Texan and have a Texan teacher as a mother in law. They both
know about Texas dancing around the slavery issue defining it entirely as a
states rights issue, while also glossing over the fact that the South started
the war by firing on Fort Sumter. Seems rather inconsistent in Texas.

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aychedee
Why kind of effed up country votes on history?

~~~
evgen
Every country does, it is just the case that in most of them you do not vote
on the people who set curriculum standards directly. Who decided what would be
in your history textbook and how it would be presented? I can promise you that
some politician is at the top of that food chain. In some ways the UK is far
worse because it is carefully hidden behind layers of ossified class hierarchy
and centuries of a toxic mix of arrogance and prejudice.

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jacobmoe
Last time I visited Austin I went to the state capital and was pretty
surprised to see how history was told on the monuments there. I don't remember
the wording exactly, but there were references to the "war of northern
aggression" and Confederate soldiers who died "protecting states rights". I
wonder how this disconnect between how civil war history is told in school and
how it's told in public spaces will play out in the long run.

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rurban
Let's see what they'll tell about the Texan Oil War and the Coal Wars. The
university in Austin teaches it right, but even Wikipedia is wildly censored
to spread the government POV there:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_oil_boom#Discoveries_spr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_oil_boom#Discoveries_spread)

> These efforts at controlling production, intended to protect both the
> independent operators and the major producers, were largely unsuccessful at
> first and led to widespread oil smuggling.

The largest producers demanded the governor to shutdown competition. They did
this with the help of the Texan National Guard to protect their cartel and
thus the Railroad Commission was born. Upton Sinclair or Howard Zinn are much
more accurate than Wikipedia.

The other prominent high-profile Texan criminals are either still alive or
just died, so their rosy view of history is still censored in their favor.

On the other hand the Coal Wars Wikipedia article is pretty accurate, but this
didn't happen in Texas.

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pimmen
To the people who say it was about ”states’ rights” and not slavery I ask: A
state’s right to what?

And it’s interesting that we focus on states’ rights and not human rights.

~~~
brightball
For what it’s worth, I spent a lot of time studying the CW for the past few
years as a hobby. The states rights thing came down to equal enforcement of
federal policy.

Around 1830 prior, South Carolina was denied the ability to set its own port
tariff when it tried to assert states rights. See Tariff of Abominations. When
the fugitive slave act wasn’t enforced it was seen as northern legal bias.
This was a big deal because it was already seen as big problem. Around the
time of the war, 80% of the US federal tax revenue came from the south while
most spending benefited the north.

The root cause of the war was absolutely slavery, but when people say there
were a lot of contributing factors...they aren’t kidding. Including parts that
nobody on either side wants to talk about.

The history is really interesting and studying it goes a long way toward
helping to understand how we got to where we are as a country today. 150 years
ago or not, we still feel the effects today.

~~~
russdill
Sure, states always have had causes against the federal government. But their
declaration of causes didn't include anything but issues surrounding slavery.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180312074805/http://www.teachi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180312074805/http://www.teachingushistory.org/lessons/DecofImCauses.htm)

~~~
brightball
The SC declaration was a bit more nuanced. You’re right that the other 3
declarations were almost entirely about slavery though.

There’s a breakdown here:

[https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/reasons-
secessio...](https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/reasons-secession)

Also, fwiw, that site used to be civilwar.org. I’m not sure when it was
rebranded.

~~~
mannykannot
One might suspect that SC was a bit more savvy in how it presented its case to
the world. Britain, a major trading party for the southern states (and having
been as guilty as the US in establishing and profiting from slavery in the
Americas, and was still profiting indirectly), had by then abolished slavery
in its own colonies, and was divided in its attitude to the Confederacy.

Regardless of what considerations went into that particular declaration, it is
clearly a minority position and so should not be given greater weight than the
majority.

~~~
brightball
I don’t think it’s a matter of weight so much as people just having different
priorities. There were only 4 declarations of causes despite 11 states
secession.

4 of them seceded specifically in response to being requisitioned for troops
without congressional approval. Virginia’s articles even went so far as to say
they would rejoin.

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jacobmoe
Considering that the country seems to be getting farther apart when it comes
to the culture war, this news is pretty surprising.

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edoo
Slavery was already on the way out. It was all about protectionist laws.
Slavery doesn't create wealth, it actually holds back industrialization. There
are countries in Africa where slavery is still rampant and it does not create
wealth for them. The Civil War was about nothing but crony capitalism.

It is incredibly important that the idea of slavery is pushed as the cause for
the civil war. Without that it becomes obvious the path we took was not for
the better of the country. Without the civil war slavery would still have been
abolished yet states would still have strong rights. Our country was lost.

~~~
vkou
On its way out? Slave states were fighting tooth and nail to keep it.

An institution doesn't have to create wealth for an entire country, in order
to persist. It only has to create wealth for the rich and powerful.

The Civil War was absolutely about slavery. The South sure thought it was. The
amount of ink it spilled on the subject of protecting that one particular
right of a state was staggering. It was the one thing that apparently, they
could compromise on. It's almost as if preserving the right to keep human
beings like cattle was the whole bloody point of their secession.

~~~
edoo
Go read all of Lincoln's racist quotes. He is on record saying he would keep
the slaves slaves if that meant the country stayed together. He wanted them
all exported back to Africa. Slave owners in the south were a very small
percentage of the population. The south did not rise up to defend slave
owners. They rose up to defend themselves.

~~~
tcbawo
Lincoln was in favor of maintaining the status quo in order to keep the
country intact. However, the Southern states were planning secession prior to
his election. What were the Northern states planning to do to the South? What
was the South defending themselves from?

~~~
edoo
They were defending themselves from protectionism. The states had every right
to secede. Lincoln ushered in the era of crony capitalism. All wars are a
racket, every single one.

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apo
_The board also decided to keep Hillary Clinton and Helen Keller in the
curriculum, reversing a decision that made headlines in September. Clinton and
Keller were initially removed, along with other historical figures, in an
effort to "streamline" the state's social studies standards._

Having gotten a close-up sample of California's approach to teaching history,
any coverage that Texas may have been giving to Clinton and Keller would
probably have amounted to one bullet point at best in practice. This is just
political posturing.

~~~
kodablah
> This is just political posturing.

This is often the case as I see it due to the differences between the
perceived methods of teaching/learning history and the actual methods (coupled
with the differences in value too). Once reasonable comprehension can occur in
youth, knowledge is obtained these days from a multitude of sources. Also
history teachers, more than others, tend to deviate based on personal
preferences making centralized bullet points only as valuable as their
disseminators. While this may sound scary, good teachers like historical
orators of the past can do wonders with narratives. Regardless, children
obtain so much from the internet, documentaries, and other avenues of self
learning that specific textbook statements are often overvalued simply out of
fear of misrepresentation.

