Study the Course of the Civil War With South Carolina School Children Circa 1918

I wanted to look at what South Carolina school children learned about the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era in the early 20th Century by reading the leading textbook on the history of South Carolina. The Simms History of South Carolina had been published by William Simms in 1860. In 1916, the South Carolina state superintendent of education asked Mary Simms Oliphant to author a new adaptation of the book. It would become the standard eighth grade South Carolina history textbook.

I have already written about what the book says about the lead-up to the start of the Civil War. This post will look at how it describes the course of the war.

Oliphant’s book was revised over the decades, but in one edition or another it was used from World War I until the 1970s. Many South Carolinians have written recollections of reading the books as children. Oliphant described slavery in the most dishonest way possible. She wrote in the 1958 edition:

“The Africans were used to a hot climate. They made fine workers under the Carolina sun….Africans were brought from a worse life to a better one. As slaves, they were trained in the ways of civilization. Above all, the landowners argued, the slaves were given the opportunity to become Christians in a Christian land, instead of remaining heathen in a savage country.”

Imagine a Black child reading that? She continued her description of slavery as a sort of benevolent welfare statr:

“Most masters treated their slaves kindly … the law required the master to feed his slaves, clothe them properly, and care for them when they were sick….Most slaves were treated well, if only because it was to the planter’s interest to have them healthy and contented.”

You can find the 1918 edition of the book here.

Here is how the 1918 edition covered the Civil War. Some of the text is accurate, but it also leaves out an awful lot. I have reproduced substantial excerpts.

The South Carolina history spends a fair amount of space describing the attack on Fort Sumter in April of 1861. Without reporting that the Federal forces inside the isolated fort were outnumbered by 50 to 1 by the rebel units arrayed around it, the South Carolina history describes the Federal resistance as “feeble.” Major Anderson, the Federal commander, is depicted as surrendering at the first opportunity.

The book next provides a comparison of the strengths of the opposing sides. The author notes that twice as many people lived in the North as in the South. It also says that nearly half of the Southern population “were negroes, and unavailable for army service.” While a modern fraud campaign has claimed that there were “Black Confederates” who fought under Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals, the South Carolina history accurately states that this was not true.

 

Section 364 of the book correctly says that the White population of South Carolina was 291,000 in 1860. The Black population in the 1860 Census was 412,000, nearly all of whom were enslaved. So South Carolina had a solid Black majority in 1860. Among Whites, only a small percentage were voters, just 40,000. This was not a state with a strong democratic tradition.

By 1862, South Carolina had already lost some of its Sea Islands to Union troops. The City of Charleston became a repeated scene of Union attacks. South Carolina’s governor imposed harsh restriction on the civilians of the city because it was seen as a metropolis filled with potential spies. Here is how the text describes this on page 275.

The two chapters on the Civil War concentrate on battles (really mostly skirmishes) fought on South Carolina soil. The Confederate victory at Secessionville, South Carolina on June 16, 1862, which is relatively unknown today, is described by the book as a “decisive” Confederate victory! The book also focuses on South Carolina leaders in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Wade Hampton and Maxey Gregg get a lot of attention. No attention at all is paid to the beginnings of the recruitment of the United States Colored Troops and the many South Carolinians, many enslaved, who aided the Union armies. Instead, wartime South Carolina is presented as unified in support of the Confederate cause.

We’ll skip ahead now to 1864. The May and June Overland Campaign was a hard fought struggle between Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. While Grant lost more men than Lee, each army lost similar percentages of men. After each battle of the campaign, Grant maneuvered further south, always closer to the Confederate capital. The book gave South Carolina school children the distorted idea that Lee defeated Grant during the Overland Campaign.

 

In spite of these Confederate “victories,” the book acknowledges that by the end of 1864 the faults of the Confederacy were a focus of popular anger.

In my next examination of this text book I will look at what it says about the end of the Confederacy and Reconstruction after most of its people were freed.

 

 

 

 

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