Schools Walk Into Touchy Territory With Civil War

You don’t have to look far for examples of how the Civil War stirs public debate 150 years after it began.

A private “secession ball” in Charleston, S.C., pegged to the anniversary in February of the state’s declared exit from the Union, sparked a protest from the local NAACP chapter. In Virginia, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, a Republican, got into trouble last year for issuing a proclamation on Confederate History Month without ever mentioning slavery.

Experts say schools can play a powerful role—and hold an important responsibility—in helping young people make sense of a complex conflict whose meaning continues to be hotly disputed in the public sphere. That debate is sure to be amplified, given the prominent attention the war is getting as the sesquicentennial begins this month.

“One hundred and fifty years later, we’re still fighting with many of the same questions,” said Andrew T. Mink, the director of outreach and education at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, who has administered a series of federal Teaching American History grants. “People bring a certain cultural understanding of the Civil War, of the Confederacy, of the Union. ... If teachers don’t address that, it gets addressed somewhere else.”

Recent polling suggests that Americans remain divided in their understanding of issues tied to the Civil War. The very idea of designating a Confederate History Month, for instance, which Gov. McDonnell’s two Democratic predecessors declined to do, split those surveyed. Just more than half of U.S. adults said they oppose such a remembrance, according to the poll by Harris Interactive.

Meanwhile, 54 percent of respondents said they believe the South was mainly fighting to preserve slavery, compared with 46 percent who believe the South was mainly fighting for states’ rights. (The poll did not offer further alternatives.)

Slavery’s Role

To be sure, the nation has come a long way. For decades, historians say, slavery had been largely removed from the public conversation about the war and its origins, as had such topics as the role of African-Americans in fighting for the Union. Today, they get much more attention in schools, museums, and planned commemorations of the anniversary.

Most mainstream historians now agree that slavery was the leading reason driving the conflict. “Slavery is the major cause of the Civil War,” said James I. Robertson, a Civil War historian at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, in Blacksburg. “There are people ... who will argue to the sky that slavery was just a byproduct, but without slavery, there was no cause for the North and the South to start killing each other.”

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That said, Mr. Robertson and others stress that it was by no means the only factor propelling the war, which involved a web of issues: states’ rights, differences in the Northern and Southern economies, and, of course, President Abraham Lincoln’s determination to hold the Union together, by force if necessary.

History educators say one of the biggest challenges for schools in promoting an accurate and deep understanding of the conflict may well be time. At the secondary level, the topic may be part of a yearlong course that covers the full sweep of American history; a lucky teacher might get two years.

“Teachers often find their time extremely limited to get in-depth with the Civil War,” said Anthony Napoli, the director of education at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, in New York City. “The biggest question is what to cover and what to leave out.”

Political Ramifications

Most historians believe a fundamental understanding of the conflict is vital for Americans. They call it a defining moment in U.S. history that still has many ramifications and lessons a century and a half later.

“So many of the crucial issues that were connected to the Civil War, its origins and consequences, are still with us today,” said Bernard E. Powers, a history professor at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina. “You only have to think about the question of race.”

“But it’s not just that,” he said, citing, for instance, states’ rights.

“The political problem still manifests itself today,” he said, pointing to recent debates over health-care policy. “Can the federal government require people to buy health insurance?”

And how schools teach the Civil War flares up from time to time. One recent example concerned a textbook on Virginia history found in many of that state’s public elementary schools. It came under fire last fall, after a parent complained about the book’s contention, widely disputed by historians, that thousands of blacks served as soldiers for the Confederacy.

A review by a panel of historians of Our Virginia: Past and Present and another text from the same publisher, Five Fronds Press, led the state board of education last month to withdraw approval of both and to overhaul its textbook-review process.

Still, when asked whether current teaching on the war reveals regional biases, most history educators interviewed said that if there are differences, they are far more rare than in decades past, and much less pronounced.

“I have no doubt you’re going to find pockets [of the South] where ... this ‘Lost Cause’ view is present [in the classroom], but I’ll tell you, I think it’s much too easy to draw overly simplistic regional distinctions,” said Kevin M. Levin, the history department chairman at the private St. Anne’s-Belfield School, in Charlottesville, Va., who has led workshops to help teachers with the subject. “I don’t think you can draw the same regional distinctions that were drawn a few decades ago.”

“I’m still waiting to come across the teacher ... who believes that slavery was a side son, a history professor at Clemson University, in South Carolina, who also has worked with many K-12 educators. “I have the exact opposite problem. If I get a question, it’s that a teacher considers the war to be a moral crusade [by the North], and it was not that way.

“You have to understand that slavery,” he added, “was sectional, but racism was national.”

In Hartford, Vt., Jennifer Boeri-Boyce, who teaches social studies at Hartford Memorial Middle School, said she tries to help students get past the stereotypes.

“This is not just ‘the North is great, the South is wrong’,” she said.

Analysts say textbooks generally do a reasonable job of providing a fair and accurate look at the Civil War, though that was not always so.

“For the longest time, the Civil War was kind of the dividing line,” said Kyle R. Ward, the director of social studies education at St. Cloud State University, in Minnesota, who has examined U.S. history textbooks from different eras. “You could tell fairly quickly if a textbook was published for a Southern state or a Northern state.”

But he doesn’t see such differences in textbooks now. “They usually do a pretty good job of laying out ... the major issues,” Mr. Ward said.

State standards provide clues to how schools teach the war, though one analyst suggests that some give teachers little guidance.

“Apart from mentioning in passing that the Civil War happened, that’s about all you get in many states, regardless of region,” said Jeremy A. Stern, a history scholar who co-wrote a recent report by the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute that graded state history standards.

He sees little evidence of regional variations in the thrust of Civil War content in states that do get more specific, though he said Southern states are generally more apt to talk about the Civil War in state-history courses, given its impact there.

He added: “There are a number of Southern states that are notably honest in dealing with the realities of slavery and ... the coming of the Civil War.” He cited Alabama, South Carolina, and Virginia as examples.

But Mr. Stern singled out another former Confederate state for criticism.

“In Texas, it’s not just a question of omission, but ideological distortion,” he contends. “Slavery is clearly, deliberately downplayed.”

He notes, for example, that sectionalism and states’ rights are listed as causes of the war before slavery, the third item in a list in the standards, which were revised last year.

But Patricia Hardy, a member of the Texas state school board, insists there was no intention to downplay slavery. “If we put it first, we get criticized; if we put it last, we get criticized,” she said. “You can imagine how many people pick and parse what we say.”