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The traitors are inside the White House (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/shermanposting@lemmy.world
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[–] 15 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

I always start with “do you know what primary source material is?” Because it’s an innocuous question and you can usually get them to agree that looking at material from people at the time is a worthy pursuit. That’s when you can read the confederate states’ succession acts to them and watch their argument blow up like the Hindenburg.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I actually did exactly that a few years ago! I was at a neighbor's house and he mentioned that he had heard the civil war actually wasn't about slavery, but was about states rights. So I told him to read the South Carolina Declaration of Secession .

    To my neighbor's credit, he actually sat there and read it and then went "oh so it actually was about slavery."

    Unfortunately, I can't report that this was a huge epiphany that changed his overall views or way of thinking. This was around the time that Obama was getting his supreme court pick blocked, and my neighbor is still as Republican as ever to this day.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, my education growing up featured pro-confederacy curriculum pretty hard. It sums up as "The union didn't ban slavery at all until midway into the war, and even then only for rebelling states to scare the union border states into staying with the union to keep their slaves".

    Of course, they had to really gloss over the various declarations of secession, some of the legislative moves of the period, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. But in exchange there was just so much support from the daughters/sons of the confederacy... Sure they could point out how much the Union was slow-walking change, but it was absurd that we were taught that slavery was at most a footnote as to why the war kicked off.

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