Myth #1: The Civil War wasn't about slavery.
The most widespread myth is also the most basic. Across America, 60 percent to 75 percent of high-school history teachers believe and teach that the South seceded for state's rights, said Jim Loewen, author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" (Touchstone, 1996) and co-editor of "The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The 'Great Truth' about the 'Lost Cause'" (University Press of Mississippi, 2010).
"It's complete B.S.," Loewen told LiveScience. "And by B.S., I mean 'bad scholarship.'"
In fact, Loewen said, the original documents of the Confederacy show quite clearly that the war was based on one thing: slavery. For example, in its declaration of secession, Mississippi explained, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world . a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization." In its declaration of secession, South Carolina actually comes out against the rights of states to make their own laws - at least when those laws conflict with slaveholding. "In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals," the document reads. The right of transit, Loewen said, was the right of slaveholders to bring their slaves along with them on trips to non-slaveholding states.
In its justification of secession, Texas sums up its view of a union built upon slavery: "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 dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable."
The myth that the war was not about slavery seems to be a self-protective one for many people, said Stan Deaton, the senior historian at the Georgia Historical Society.
"People think that somehow it demonizes their ancestors," to have fought for slavery, Deaton told LiveScience. But the people fighting at the time were very much aware of what was at stake, Deaton said.
"[Defining the war] is our problem," he said. "I don't think it was theirs."
