Slavery And The Civil War: Rooted In Racism, by Elliott Smith

Few books are as ill-equipped to tackle the thorny issue of slavery in the Civil War as this one is. This book is, by far, the least-nuanced and worst book I have read on the subject. Worse yet, it is the sort of book that school librarians would push on students to read if they wanted to learn about the subject, and so it actively miseducates its intended audience. The problems with this book begin with its opening, where the author asserts that Northern states wanted to end slavery (4). This was patently untrue, as immediate abolitionists were always a small part of America’s population. Many Northerners wanted slavery to end, but understood that in our republic that it had to be ended by the consent of the states and communities themselves. Similarly, the author makes the bald and inaccurate statement that states’ rights only meant the right to keep slavery alive (8). Federalism is not merely a political doctrine that enforces or supports racism, but rather the proper and correct understanding that people on the ground in local communities are best-equipped to agree upon their own terms by which others may belong within the community, rather than far-off authorities in distant capitals like Washington. To be sure, federalism has implications for questions of slavery and civil rights, but it is not merely a fig leaf for racism and slavery, but rather a principled decision to let people decide who belongs in what place in their own communities without federal domination and tyranny.

This is a short book, at 32 pages, a pretty standard length for elementary school readers, but a full enumeration of its legion of errors would require a book far longer than this book itself is, not least because the author frequently makes bald and erroneous statements at every turn. The book itself is divided into four chapters. The first chapter discusses rebellion as supposedly brewing in the 1850s, ignoring the actual brewing of rebellion in the Nashville convention of 1850 and failing to properly describe the Dred Scott decision as stating that black people had no rights that white people were bound to accept, not merely that enslaved people had no rights (4-5), and erroneously stating that Lincoln was not openly opposed to slavery (5). This is followed by a chapter that discusses the beginning of the Civil War, where the author focuses on ending slavery itself rather than all of the various issues that slavery had become entangled with, like the dispensation of territories. There is a short chapter about life during the war, which discusses what life was like for the enslaved black people of the south, not discussing the life of free blacks or blacks in the North at all. This is followed by a discussion of the fight for freedom and the experience of black soldiers in the Union army, focusing mainly on the injustices that they fought and their example of bravery. The last chapter of the book deals with emancipation, which misjudges the Emancipation proclamation (unsurprisingly) and briefly discusses the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments as the beginning of the quest for freed blacks for a full recognition of their civil rights. The book then ends with some brief primary source quotes, a call for students to become activists, a glossary, source notes, a read woke reading list (where woke is viewed, incomprehensibly, as a good thing), and an index.

It is not merely that this book is so inaccurate that is so problematic, but rather that it is books like this and the approach that they take that provides the space for neo-Confederate mythmaking to influence others. Had the writer of this book shown more attention to historical accuracy, and demonstrated more historical knowledge himself, he would have been in the place to correct the historical inaccuracies that deny slavery had anything to do with the Civil War, but instead, this book seeks to reduce all of the complexity of the Civil War and of the thoughts of Americans at the time to bare statements about slavery and racism, showing the author has no awareness of either the complexities of human nature or of human history, and thus is unfit to comment upon what he does not understand. This book as a whole wants to encourage students to question everything (2), except for the inaccurate historical views that are being presented in books like this one. It encourages students to take action against Civil War monuments in general (26) and to read various woke texts about the Civil War (30), which, by the standard of this book, are not going to help students gain accurate knowledge about it. Books like this are worse than useless, in that they pretend to give knowledge while actually making their readers less knowledgeable for believing the misinformation within then they would have otherwise been.