15. Teaching the American Civil War
The Civil War, America’s most devastating in terms of loss of life, remains the most traumatic and divisive event in the history of the United States. Its causes were many, though they centered on the issue of slavery, known in the antebellum South as the peculiar institution. Supporters of the southern cause still claim otherwise; that state’s rights prevailed over the federal government, and the war was fought for that cause above all else. They argue the war was started by Northern aggression, rather than Southern attacks on federal installations in Charleston, South Carolina, including the state’s occupation of Fort Moultrie and bombardment of Fort Sumter.
Numerous educators and websites support teaching the causes and effects of the American Civil War beginning at the third-grade level, and continuing in later elementary grades and high school. By the third grade, children should understand that most Americans in the South, particularly in the rural areas, considered themselves Virginians, or South Carolinians, or Georgians, more than Americans. Their “country” was the state in which they were born and raised. New Yorkers were as foreign to them as Englishmen. Later grades explore how this sectionalism contributed to the belief the Constitution was a contract between states, dismissible when it no longer served. By high school, the Constitutional issues involved should be studied, with both positions presented as they existed in historical fact.