Study the End of the Civil War and Start of Reconstruction 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. You can find the 1918 edition of the book here.

I have already written about what the book says about the lead-up to the start of the Civil War. A second post looked at how it describes the course of the war. This third installment will look at the end of the war and the first years of Reconstruction in South Carolina.

The textbook narrates a fairly standard Lost Cause interpretation of the downfall of the Confederacy, beginning with Sherman marching into South Carolina after capturing Savannah right before Christmas in 1864. The book correctly says that there was a “decided animus against the ‘original secessionists'” of South Carolina. The author says that this view was not just held by the Union commanders, but by the “common Federal soldiers.” She says that Sherman’s army “pursued a course of wanton destruction and vandalism, ” in the Palmetto State. She does not mention that as the Union army advanced, more than half of South Carolina’s citizens were freed from slavery.

A significant portion of this section of the book looks at the destruction of Columbia by a fire set by Union occupation forces. The suffering of white civilians is retold in this account of February 17 and 18, 1865.

The book then gives a straightforward account of the end of the Confederacy, which the author basically equates with the surrender of Lee at Appomattox. She describes the Army of Northern Virginia in April of 1865 as “tattered heroes” and bemoans the fact that Lee was outnumbered by nearly three-to-one in this last campaign for his army without mentioning the numerous desertions occurring in the last weeks before the surrender.

In the textbook history, the author says that 7/8ths of South Carolina’s wealth was eliminated by the Civil War. Here is what she says:

So, out of the “$400,000,000 of property in South Carolina in 1861 little more than $50,000,000 remained in 1865,” a terrible loss, unless you look at what happened to the $350,000,000 that was “lost.” Now, according to the textbook, there was a loss of $5,000,000 in bank assets. So about 2% of what was “lost” was cash or bank deposits. Seizure of cotton amounted to $20,000,000, which was about 6% of the total losses. However, ending slavery “lost” the state $200,000,000! This meant that setting people free lost the state forty times as much as had been lost with banks becoming insolvent! Of course, freeing people did not eliminate those people, it just meant that they were no longer kept as slaves. These African Americans were still able to perform labor, but just not as chattel slaves.

When you read old books published in the South along what is known as a “Lost Cause” interpretation of this era and they complain about the state being reduced to ruin by Lincoln or Grant, always remember that most of the economic damages that are complained of are from the freeing of the slaves.

In the next section, the textbook looks at elections right after the Confederate surrender. Contrary to Lost Cause blowhards of the 21st Century, the textbook correctly points out that elections in South Carolina allowed most Confederates to vote. There were no bars on white men voting either. There were some prohibitions on men educated at West Point or Annapolis, or former members of Congress and other high officers, who left their positions to join the Confederacy.

The governor of South Carolina was Benjamin Franklin Perry, a white politician who had opposed secession but who had supported the Confederacy during the war. He was appointed governor by President Andrew Johnson and he called a convention for the drafting of new laws. Every person elected to this convention was white.

Here is what the textbook says and it is much more accurate than modern Confederate apologists:

As you can see, the all-white legislature elected by only white citizens of South Carolina made one of its first acts the passage of the “Black Code,” which even the author of this Lost Cause narrative describes as “very severe legislation enacted for the protection of the white man against the negro.”

The book explains to middle school children why the “Black Codes” were passed:

While some modern Lost Cause apologists claim that South Carolina was following some Northern laws restricting Black rights, the textbook makes no mention of South Carolina’s “Black Codes” being dependent on laws from outside its state. Six decades after the end of the war, South Carolina’s school authorities felt that children needed to understand that the state’s Black citizens were irresponsible, uneducated, unmoral, and, in many cases, brutish Africans.” Of course, many of these “Africans” could trace their lineage further back in South Carolina’s history than their former white overseers!

Because several Northern states did not allow Blacks to vote, the author says that:

While Blacks were barred from voting, sitting on juries, and holding elected offices, the author finds equally detestable the use of Black Union troops, many of whom were citizens of South Carolina, as part of the occupation forces. Here is how the author describes the near race riots the whites were about to impose on the Black population:

As usual, its seems as though most South Carolinians saw the presence of the U.S.C.T. as a good thing, but the author only looks at the views of whites.

While the author says that Congress passed the 14th Amendment to show it had conquered the South, in fact a big impetus was tp prevent the passage of “Black Codes” across the South by all-white legislatures.

The next section looked at the conditions that Southern states could return to Congress.

Readers know that many former Confederates occupied state positions during Reconstruction, but they overwhelmingly refused to treat Black citizens as civilly equal. When these segregationists were removed by the military commanders, the book terms this “absolute militarism.”

The author then looks at who the voters were in 1868. Mind you, the author had already acknowledged that Blacks formed an absolute majority of people in the state.

While the author bemoans the number of white voters registering to vote as being so small, she neglects to mention that many conservative whites had issued calls for white men not to register, which is one of the reasons whites were outnumbered. The other is that Blacks outnumbered whites by a clear margin. Mind you that Blacks had never been able to vote before the end of the Civil War. That is not mentioned at all in this 20th Century history of South Carolina.

This is why we have Black History Month.

The next section looks at what the new Reconstruction Constitutional Convention did:

Now you might think that saying that “No property or educational qualifications were required for voting” is a neutral statement of fact. In fact, it was a condemnation. Many Southern states by 1919 had adopted property and educational qualifications as a way of keeping Black people from voting and continued to use these tools until the 1950s.

The book also criticizes the “costly provision” of education for “negro children” which was only available to white children if they went to negro schools. In fact, there was no statewide public schools in South Carolina before the Civil War and this provision opened the first statewide public education to all children on an equal basis. These were not Black schools allowing whites to attend, they were schools that were non-segregated.

The former ruling class convened their own convention hosted by the Democratic Party of South Carolina.

In a scene out of “Birth of a Nation,” the author gives a look at the legislature selected without regard to color:

“Renegades,” in case you don’t know, are what conservative South Carolinians called whites who voted for anyone other than conservatives.

The next paragraph may look like honors given to the Radical governor for his advocacy of “Negro Equality,” but it was not written for that purpose:

In the next installment of this series, we will look at how South Carolina educated its children about its “Redemption” from “Negro Rule,” the role of the Ku Klux Klan in reasserting white supremacy, and former-Confederate General Wade Hampton’s role in restoring white rule.

Note: The feature illustration was created by Pat Young using MS Copilot, and AI generator. There is nothing historically correct about it.

 

 

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