How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

The Richmond Examiner unambiguously captured the sentiment many Southerners held at that time, asking General Mahone and his men not to relent: “Shut your eyes, General, strengthen your stomach with a little brandy and water, and let the work, which God has entrusted to you and your brave men, go forward to its full completion; that is, until every negro has been slaughtered…butcher every negro that Grant sends against your brave troops, and permit them not to soil their hands with the capture of a single hero.”

People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege,

It is not simply that statues of Lee and other Confederates stand as monuments to a traitorous army predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery; it is also that we, US taxpayers, are paying for their maintenance and preservation.

Smithsonian’s investigation found that in total, the state had spent approximately $9 million in today’s dollars. Much of that funding goes directly to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which received over $1.6 million in funds for Confederate cemeteries from the State of Virginia between 1996 and 2018.

Cemeteries filled with Black and formerly enslaved people have never received commensurate financial support.

The Virginia legislature passed the Historical African American Cemeteries and Graves Act in 2017, to demonstrate its commitment to making amends for this injustice, but at the time of the Smithsonian in...

There were far fewer tombstones at the People’s Memorial Cemetery than at Blandford, and those there were indiscriminately scattered across the brown grass. There were no flags ornamenting the graves. There were no hourly tours available for people to remember the dead. There was history, but also silence.

Gramling began his speech by sharing a story about the origin of Memorial Day. “I’ve read several people writing about Memorial Day and how it started. I come across one the other day. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I like it. And I wanted to share that with you this afternoon.”

Confederate soldiers, according to this narrative, were US military veterans just as those who had fought in World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq. It did not seem to matter that they had fought against the US; he believed they should be remembered as US veterans themselves.

The Lost Cause is a movement that gained traction in the late nineteenth century that attempted to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family, honor, and heritage rather than what it was, a traitorous effort to extend and expand the bondage of Black people.

The movement asserted that the Civil War was not actually about slavery, that the soldiers and generals who fought in the war were honorable men who did so simply for their families and communities, not because of any racist antagonism.

It attempted to rewrite US history.

A new generation of white Southerners who had no memory of the war had come of age, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy had raised enough money to build memorials to these men. The goal, in part, was to teach the younger generations of white Southerners who these men had been and that the cause they had fought for was an honorable one.

These monuments served as physical embodiments of the terror campaign directed at Black communities.

The UDC alone is responsible for erecting more than seven hundred memorials and monuments across the country, according to the Washington Post, over four hundred of which are on public grounds.

testaments to the Lost Cause can be found all across the country, including, at the time of this writing, in California, Washington State, South Dakota, Delaware, New York, and Massachusetts.

The myth seeps into many other facets of state-sanctioned life. In eleven states there are a total of twenty-three Confederate holidays and observances.

In both Alabama and Mississippi, Robert E. Lee’s birthday is celebrated on the same day as Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

former Confederate general Bradley T. Johnson explained that slavery was “the apprenticeship by which savage races had been educated and trained into civilization by their superiors.”

Thomas Nelson Page, a writer from Virginia who was just twelve years old when the war ended, exemplified this misguided nostalgia in stories that appealed to white Northerners and Southerners alike. Using his conception of nineteenth-century Black dialect, he wrote about enslaved people who longed for the era of slavery to return.

The Lost Cause was not an accident. It was not a mistake that history stumbled into. It was a deliberate, multifaceted, multi-field effort predicated on both misremembering and obfuscating what the Confederacy stood for, and the role that slavery played in shaping this country.

There have been claims that up to one hundred thousand Black soldiers fought for the Confederate Army, that Black men fought under General Robert E. Lee, and that these men valiantly died as part of racially integrated regiments willing to sacrifice their lives to save the South. There is no evidence to support this.

The myth of Black Confederate soldiers emerged in the 1970s, pushed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. This story was a response to changing public perceptions of the Civil War in the years after the civil rights movement—away from Lost Cause mythology and toward recognition that slavery was central to this conflict.

Robert M. T. Hunter, a senator from Virginia, is reported to have said, “What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?”

General Howell Cobb, was even more explicit: “If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”

Louisiana: The people of the slaveholding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery.

Texas: We hold, as undeniable truths, that the governments of the various States and of the Confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependant [sic] race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

Virginia: The people of Virginia in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America adopted by them in Convention on the twenty-fifth day of June in the year of our Lord one thousand, seven hundred and eighty-eight having declared that the powers granted under the said Constitution were derived from the people of the United States, and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression; and the Federal Government, having perverted said powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slaveholding States.

Missouri Compromise. One amendment even attempted to make it impossible for future amendments to overturn the other five. The proposal was supported by the majority of Southern politicians, but Northern Republicans, including Lincoln, refused to accept it.

Jefferson Davis published a history of the Confederacy claiming that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War and that there would have been a civil war even if no American ever owned a slave.

There is no shortage of documentation demonstrating that the Southern states seceded and began sowing the seeds of war in order to defend slavery.

As Cox notes, they saw children as “living monuments” who would go on to defend the principles of states’ rights and white supremacy in ways that no inanimate monument could.

But there was also an irony in Jason’s admission of fear. These monuments had been erected decades ago with the intention of rewriting history and instilling fear in Black communities, and now it was Jason who felt scared to stand in front of the same monuments.

Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and pointed out that “the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery.” In 1861, almost half of those Confederate soldiers either owned enslaved people or lived with a head of household who did,

The Louisville Daily Courier warned non-slaveholding white Southerners about the slippery slope of abolition and the dangers of racial equality: “Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the negro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the negro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them?”

Without slavery, they were told, they would be forced to live, work, and inevitably procreate with their free Black neighbors. This was a proposition that millions of Southern whites were unwilling to accept.

You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.”

What would it take—what does it take—for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life?

Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been? Just because something is difficult to accept doesn’t mean you should refuse to accept it.

Despite the order of the proclamation, Texas was one of the Confederate states that ignored what it demanded.

General Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, in Appomattox County, Virginia, effectively signaling that the Confederacy had lost the war, but many enslavers in Texas did not share this news with their human property.

It was on June 19, 1865, soon after arriving in Galveston, that Granger issued the announcement, known as General Order Number 3, that all slaves were free and word began to spread throughout Texas, from plantation to plantation, farmstead to farmstead, person to person.

We was all walkin’ on golden clouds…We was free. Just like that we was free.”

today. I had grown up in a world that never tired of telling me and other Black children like me all of the things that were wrong with us, all of the things we needed to do better.

there is enormous value in providing young people with the language, the history,

Understanding that all of this was done not by accident but by design.

How different might our country look if all of us fully understood what has happened here?

I asked Stephen why he thought more white people didn’t participate in Juneteenth events. “They think it’s just a Black thing,” he said. “And my argument is it’s not ‘a Black thing,’ it’s an American thing. This is the final bit of freedom for us all. And that’s just so important.”