How America forgot the true history of the Civil War

The Lost Cause was the most successful propaganda campaign in American history

Escaped slaves who joined the Union army, 1863.
(Image credit: Glasshouse Images / Alamy Stock Photo)

After the clashes and white supremacist terror attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, the latest dimension of our unfolding national meltdown is over monuments to the Confederacy. In retaliation for the violence in Charlottesville, demonstrators pulled down a Confederate statue in Durham, several cities in the North quickly yanked theirs down, and several other places are considering the same thing. President Trump in turn complained about the "history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments."

Confederate statues are generally not very aesthetically memorable. They are far more important for what they represent: a bill still being paid for over a century of deliberate forgetting and rewriting of the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.