A side issue, but I think it may be just cause to wonder who the victors of that conflict actually were in the end... turns out, it may have been 'white people' generally on 'both sides', after a brief period of "reconstruction" that could have ended differently but didn't. All those statues were erected after that period -- indeed they do look kind of like victory statues, curious isn't it? Who won what before erecting those statues, hmm?
The proverb of course isn't literally always true, it isn't only "the victors" who write history. But the powerful do have a disproportionate (but not exclusive) influence on what gets remembered how (what gets remembered how is a factor of both what historical record is left and who can advance their interpretation of it). The victors tend to be more powerful than the vanquished, if they don't appear to be then there might be some confusion over who won what exactly.
I haven't heard that interpetation of history. It sounds dubious to me... after all, slavery was abolished, and the Fourteenth Amendment was passed. And the South was set way back, economically, compared to the North.
It is a period of history absolutely essential for understanding how we got to where we are, which is often not taught at all to schoolchildren.
It began with Black elected legislators and city council members and increased Black economic activity and equality and integration. It ended with the return of de facto Black serfdom and disenfranchisement in the South. And that's when they started putting up the statues. (Who is "they"? It wasn't Black people putting up the statues, was it? So who won and who lost?)
Heather Cox Richardson (who has gained recognition lately with her daily posts on politics) is actually a historian, her book is titled "How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America"
Here's a New Yorker article by Adam Gopnick with the same title, which is actually a review of a different book by Henry Louis Gates. It gives you an overview of how Reconstruction went.
> One mistake the North made was to allow the Confederate leadership to escape essentially unscathed. Lincoln’s plea for charity and against malice was admirable, but it left out the third term of the liberal equation: charity for all, malice to none, and political reform for the persecutors. The premise of postwar de-Nazification, in Germany, was a sound one: you had to root out the evil and make it clear that it was one, and only then would minds change. The gingerly treatment of the secessionists gave the impression—more, it created the reality—that treason in defense of slavery was a forgivable, even “honorable,” difference of opinion. Despite various halfhearted and soon rescinded congressional measures to prevent ex-Confederate leaders from returning to power, many of them didn’t just skip out but skipped right back into Congress.
These are the people who had the resources and power to put up those statues...
Thank you for the explanation, I see what you mean.
I wouldn't describe it as the South "winning", but the North clearly didn't solidify the win quickly enough. I wonder whether that was a bad idea, or whether it came from some real fragility of the North's win, or the fact that it was a civil rather than a foreign win?
I tend to take position that history is made by the present “victors” or “powerful”.
Right now, Hitler was evil, Jesus was good, Ghandi is good, Rome was important, Greek philosophy matters, etc
But in some future time or different place, history is different. Columbus used to be a hero, now he’s a far more controverisal figure. Maybe some fascistic future would see Hitler cast as a hero much like George Washington. History will have changed.
The past happened how it happened, but how that past is filtered and turned into the narrative we call history happens in the present
The proverb of course isn't literally always true, it isn't only "the victors" who write history. But the powerful do have a disproportionate (but not exclusive) influence on what gets remembered how (what gets remembered how is a factor of both what historical record is left and who can advance their interpretation of it). The victors tend to be more powerful than the vanquished, if they don't appear to be then there might be some confusion over who won what exactly.