Kevin Berland wrote yesterday, 

"From the point of view of simple historiographical theory (and from the
point of view of the familiar proverb) the victors write the histories.
To claim that many histories of the civil war suffer from a one-sided
point of view is neither new nor radical.  It's simply true."

I hate to disagree with my friend Kevin, but a good argument can be made
(and I have hinted at it, myself, before) that even though the
Confederacy lost the Civil War on the battlefield, the South can be said
to have won the history.

The influence of Southern and pro-Southern interpretations in the
post-Civil War histories may be in some part responsible for the fact
that we are still intensely debating whether secession was legal or
right (which are not the same thing), whether the South or the North
bore the larger share of responsibility for the first fighting, whether
or to what extent the institution of slavery was a cause of the war,
what the aims of the South and the North were and whether or why they
changed, why Southern leaders made different assertions about their
motivations after 1865 than they did in 1861, and so forth and so on.
Where else in the world, I beg to ask, have the leaders of an
unsuccessful rebellion against a government been so lionized as in the
American South?

If the winners had won the literature as well as the last battles,
perhaps a national consensus would have developed that regarded the
Southern claims and objectives as invalidated by the verdict of the
contending armies.

$0.02 U.S. currency from

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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