February 1, 2024
Troy D. Smith
“Why Is Everyone Talking So Much About the Civil War?”
I want to preface this week’s piece by mentioning the
passing of Donald Holman, who was one of my “opposite numbers” on this opinion
page. I did not know him personally, but I know many of his kinfolks and we had
many friends in common, and I know he was a valued and loved part of our
community. God bless his family.
I spent the last three weeks talking about Nikki Haley’s
slavery comment (or lack thereof) and why we know what the Civil War was
actually about. I realize this is on top of a lengthy series I did earlier in
the year about the history of slavery, so some of you may be tired of hearing
me talk on the subject -I understand. As a historian, I am tired of HAVING to
talk on the subject because so many people need reminders about this basic
component of American history and the legacy of it. So this week I am going to
wrap that topic up (for now) by explaining why it’s important and what it means
today.
It is not a bizarre coincidence that Lost Cause Ideology has
taken such a strong hold among many contemporary Republicans (notice I do not
say “all Republicans” -and rarely if ever do so). It is less about the history
of the past than the politics of the present, as is often the case about so
many things. Some Republican governors, in support of the Texas governor’s
disagreement with the federal government over whether it’s okay to allow
undocumented immigrants to drown or to flat-out kill them, are actually calling
back to the Civil War and using former Confederate terms like nullification and
even secession. Terms, by the way, which have long been generally considered
proven invalid by the Civil War. For them, stating that the Civil War was about
states’ rights and government overreach fits in with their modern policy goals.
If one could highlight those ideas -without adding or acknowledging the context
of slavery -one could also circumvent the conclusion that the war was connected
to race or racism, either, and many modern conservatives are heavily invested
in denying the existence of institutional or even implicit, unconscious,
racism.
This is why it is people under thirty who are most likely to
be historically ignorant of the role slavery and racism have played in our
nation’s story. It has gotten minimized, misidentified, or outright ignored in
public schools the last several years (after a period, from the 1970s to the
early 2000s, when it was finally being addressed in classrooms). There is a
similarly shocking lack of accurate understanding among young people about the
Holocaust. This is often, as is the case in Tennessee, enforced by law in
majority conservative states. The ball was really started rolling in this effort
by former president Trump in the closing months of his presidency, when he
started harping on “critical race theory” and how allegedly un-American it is.
All the conservative legislative efforts that have come in the wake of that
have been attempts to ride Trump’s coattails with his base and to return U.S.
education to the triumphalist narrative that was the norm in schools before the
Civil Rights Movement. Same with the book banning. It is ridiculously
transparent, no matter how much plausible deniability they try to bake into the
wording of the laws.
If the story we tell about ourselves is that nothing bad or negative
has ever been true about our country, the implication is there is nothing that needs
to be overcome or fixed now (which flies in the face of the Constitution, which
was set up to be amended over time). We are then producing a citizenry that is
incapable of actually understanding what is going on around them, and why, let
alone have the capacity for empathy toward those Americans who are not just exactly
like them.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee
Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE
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