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Arlington’s Former ‘Lost Cause’ Textbooks — “A series of textbooks written for the fourth, seventh and 11th grades taught a generation of Virginians our state’s history. Chapter 29 of the seventh-grade edition, titled ‘How the Negroes Lived Under Slavery,’ included these sentences: ‘A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes.’ The masters ‘knew the best way to control their slaves was to win their confidence and affection.'” [Washington Post, Washington Post]

Outlook • Perspective

The lies our textbooks told my generation of Virginians about slavery

State leaders went to great lengths to instill their gauzy version of the Lost Cause in young minds

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=

The seventh-grade edition of the history textbook issued to Virginia pupils from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

By Bennett Minton
Bennett Minton, a policy analyst, blogger and grass-roots political organizer, was a Virginia resident until 2018. He lives in Portland, Ore.
July 31, 2020 at 9:35 a.m. EDT

A series of textbooks written for the fourth, seventh and 11th grades taught a generation of Virginians our state’s history. Chapter 29 of the seventh-grade edition, titled “How the Negroes Lived Under Slavery,” included these sentences: “A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes.” The masters “knew the best way to control their slaves was to win their confidence and affection.” Enslaved people “went visiting at night and sometimes owned guns and other weapons.” “It cannot be denied that some slaves were treated badly, but most were treated with kindness.” Color illustrations featured masters and slaves all dressed smartly, shaking hands amiably.

This was the education diet that Virginia’s leaders fed me in 1967, when my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Stall, issued me the first book in the series deep into the second decade of the civil rights movement. Today, Virginia’s symbols of the Lost Cause are falling. But banishing icons is the easy part. Statues aren’t history; they’re symbols. Removing a symbol requires only a shift in political power. A belief ingrained as “history” is harder to dislodge.

How hard becomes clearer when you understand the lengths to which Virginia’s White majority culture went to teach young pupils that enslaved people were contented servants of honorable planters — and why for all of my six decades we have been intermittently dismantling the myth that the Confederacy represented anything noble. That dismantling began with Reconstruction 155 years ago and still isn’t finished.

Historian Adam Wesley Dean explored the origin of my textbook in his 2009 article “ ‘Who Controls the Past Controls the Future’: The Virginia History Textbook Controversy.” It was President Harry Truman’s 1948 integration of the armed forces that spurred Virginia’s leaders to create it. A state commission took control of the history curriculum from local school boards, choosing the writers and supervising the text. The publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, sold the books to every public school for the three grades. All students were taught the same narrative. My fourth-grade edition included this: “Some of the Negro servants left the plantations because they heard President Lincoln was going to set them free. But most of the Negroes stayed on the plantations and went on with their work. Some of them risked their lives to protect the white people they loved.” And “General Lee was a handsome man with a kind, strong face. He sat straight and firm in his saddle. Traveller stepped proudly as if he knew that he carried a great general.”

The lead historian for the seventh-grade edition was Francis Simkins, of Longwood College in Farmville. His 1947 book, “The South Old and New,” was an articulation of the Lost Cause. Slavery was “an educational process which transformed the black man from a primitive to a civilized person endowed with conceits, customs, industrial skills, Christian beliefs, and ideals, of the Anglo-Saxon of North America,” he wrote in that book. During the Civil War, enslaved people “remained so loyal to their masters [and] supported the war unanimously.” During Reconstruction, “blacks were aroused to political consciousness not of their own accord but by outside forces.” Spotswood Hunnicutt, a co-author, believed that as a result of post-bellum interpretations, students were “confused” that “slavery caused a war in 1861.” The commission was “looking after the best interest of the students.” The “primary function of history,” she concluded, was “to build patriotism.”

In the fall of 1967, I suppose I digested what I was fed. But later in the school year, I would absorb events that defined an era: the Tet Offensive and the erosion of our acceptance of the government’s assertions; the assassinations of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy; the riots outside the Democratic National Convention. By the time fifth grade started, I was reading this newspaper and questioning everything. My particular curiosity propelled me beyond my textbook. But only while watching city workers take down Stonewall Jackson’s statue in Richmond did I wonder how that series of books came to be.

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Bennett Minton
Bennett Minton, a policy analyst, blogger and grass-roots political organizer, was a Virginia resident until 2018. He lives in Portland, Ore.