The war between the states was a war between peoples of all colors, on both sides of the fight. White men, and enslaved and free African Americans all those sides [sic]… Thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.
Joy Masoff is not trained a historian. The author of “Oh Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty” and “Oh Yikes! History’s Grossest Moments” says she is, instead, “a fairly respected writer.” And on Wednesday, when the WaPo reported she had included the passage above in a textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders she said, “As controversial as it is, I stand by what I write.”
It turns out her source was work by members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans that she found on the internet. The group has long claimed that a substantial number of black soldiers fought for the South and that the Civil War was not fought over slavery. Scholars and historians are nearly unanimous in rejecting those claims. Masoff says:
“It’s just one sentence. I don’t want to ruffle any feathers. If the historians had contacted me and asked me to take it out, I would have.”
She added that the book was reviewed by a publisher’s advisory council of educators and that none of the advisers objected to the textbook’s assertion.
Cynic, writing for Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic, did some digging:
Masoff, tellingly, couldn’t even manage to crib quack revisionism from the Web without garbling it. The sources she cites in her defense claim that there were two companies of colored soldiers in the Jackson Battalion, raised almost two years after Jackson’s death from the workers and convalescents at a Richmond Hospital bearing his name. Those companies morph, mysteriously, into “two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.”
But the problems go beyond “just one sentence,” as Masoff put it…At the simplest level, this is the sort of mindless pablum so often produced to satisfy poorly-conceived curricular standards, which take a check-list approach to evaluation. Virginia mandates that textbooks describe “the roles played by whites, enslaved African Americans, free African Americans, and American Indians” in the Civil War. The passage seems carefully-tailored to allow the review committee to check that box off its list. (Meanwhile, a far superior history textbook with a more sophisticated account of the war was challenged for its failure to mention the Canadian shield.)
But then, there’s the substance. It offers a false and pernicious equivalency, as if race were no more than incidental to the struggle. If the occasional slave was brought to the front by his master as a man-servant, or if slaves were used as laborers, or if in the waning days of the war, a handful of blacks were grudgingly allowed into uniform, it does not alter the core meaning of the struggle. These are fascinating exceptions, presented as if they were the rule, and without any sense of the tensions and contradictions they embody. To present the Civil War as a fight “between peoples of all colors, on both sides” is to utterly misrepresent the causes and meanings of the bloodiest struggle in our history.
The worst sins here, though, are those of omission. Where is the capsule biography of George Henry Thomas, the Old Dominion’s noblest son? Where is the account of the thousands of Virginians who emancipated themselves, fled through the lines to freedom, and demanded the right to don the Union blue and free those still enslaved? Is Virginia not equally proud of their courage and sacrifice, given to a cause that was moral and just?
In a Slate Explainer Don Waters wonders, Can just anyone write a school history textbook? His answer… Yes, but:
It’s rare for self-published, single-author textbooks to get approved, but it happens. The faulty textbook in Virginia, which was published by a company owned by the author, made it through a review committee consisting of three teachers, an open public comment period, and a final board review before becoming one of 61 state-approved titles last spring. The same author has five other titles on the list.
The Atlantic Wire has a round-up of reaction and the full text of the passage. It’s easy to blame Masoff. She should have known better; she should have done more. But so should every person serving on that review committee. I’m not seeing much said about that.