The Historians Lied: The Confederacy REALLY Did Win the Civil War

As a historian I should know these things.  But in truth, I woke up this morning, my mind stumbling around in its own swampy miasma.  We all know the adage:  "the victors write the history".  So, why in the South, had the losing side in the Civil War re-written the history to lie about it's cause (states' rights rather than slavery), lie about its name (War Between the States rather than the Civil War) and even lie about its outcome (We Fought Tyranny and Won).

The truth struck me like a whip's lash across my bare back.  After being defeated in battle by the Union Army, the Confederacy went on to win the war in the South.  I won't bore you with all the sad and somewhat sordid details that ended the period of so-called Reconstruction in the South (See below).  But suffice it to say, that the only losers in this war were the former slaves.  There was no land redistribution for these landless peasants. They became instead impoverished sharecroppers.  Jim Crow laws were instituted to take the place of the social rigidity of slavery.  The Ku Klux Klan, white citizens councils and other white terrorist groups lynched blacks as a way of stoking fear. The former slaves were then removed from the voting rolls with new tactics such as grandfather clauses, poll taxes and literacy tests, forcing them back into a state of disenfranchisement as real as what they had been during slavery.  

It was the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, that finally began fighting back against the Confederacy's victory.  Not surprisingly it was in 1962, that the battle flag that now causes so much contoversy became the so-called emblem of "Southern heritage".If the North really did win the Civil War, when will it be time to show it?  Not only the Confederate flag, but its accompanying paraphernalia needs to be retired to museums or the trash.  And even more importantly, the minds of American children in the South should no longer be filled with a false  narrative of American History, so that a fresh generation of  twenty-one year olds can, like Dylann Root, take it upon themselves to murder blacks based on false historical narratives. 

A PBS essay written by RicharWorsmer describes in brief what went wrong after the Civil War:

Reconstruction generally refers to the period in United States history immediately following the Civil War in which the federal government set the conditions that would allow the rebellious Southern states back into the Union. (The precise starting point is debatable, with some prominent scholars arguing that Reconstruction actually began during the war.) In 1862, Abraham Lincoln had appointed provisional military governors to re-establish governments in Southern states recaptured by the Union Army. The main condition for re-admittance was that at least 10 percent of the voting population in 1860 take an oath of allegiance to the Union. Aware that the Presidential plan omitted any provision for social or economic reconstruction -- or black civil rights -- the anti-slavery Congressmen in the Republican Party, known as the Radicals, criticized Lincoln's leniency.  The goal of reconstruction was to readmit the South on terms that were acceptable to the north -- full political and civil equality for blacks and the denial of the political rights of whites who were leaders of the secession movement. The Radicals wanted to insure that newly freed blacks were protected and given their rights as Americans. After Lincoln's assassination in April of 1865, President Andrew Johnson alienated Congress with his Reconstruction policy. He supported white supremacy in the South and favored pro-Union Southern political leaders who had aided the Confederacy once war had been declared. 
Southerners, with Johnson's support, attempted to restore slavery in substance if not in name. In 1866, Congress and President Johnson battled for control of Reconstruction. The Congress won. Northern voters gave a smashing victory -- more than two-thirds of the seats in Congress -- to the Radical Republicans in the 1866 congressional election, enabling Congress to control Reconstruction and override any vetoes that Johnson might impose. Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 that divided the Confederate states (except for Tennessee, which had been re-admitted to the Union) into five military districts. Each state was required to accept the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which granted freedom and political rights of blacks. 
Each Southern state had to incorporate these requirements into their constitutions, and blacks were empowered with the vote. Yet Congress failed to secure land for blacks, thus allowing whites to economically control blacks. The Freedmen's Bureau was authorized to administer the new laws and help blacks attain their economic, civil, educational, and political rights. The newly created state governments were generally Republican in character and were governed by political coalitions of blacks, Northerners who had migrated to the South (called "carpetbaggers" by Southern Democrats), and Southerners who allied with the blacks and carpetbaggers (referred to as "scalawags" by their opponents). This uneasy coalition of black and white Republicans passed significant civil rights legislation in many states. Courts were reorganized, judicial procedures improved, and public school systems established. Segregation existed but it was flexible. But as blacks slowly progressed, white Southerners resented their achievements and their empowerment, even though they were in a political minority in every state but South Carolina. 
Most whites rallied around the Democratic Party as the party of white supremacy. Between 1868 and 1871, terrorist organizations, especially the Ku Klux Klan, murdered blacks and whites who tried to exercise their right to vote or receive an education. The Klan, working with Democrats in several states, used fraud and violence to help whites regain control of their state governments. By the early 1870s, most Southern states had been "redeemed" -- as many white Southerners called it -- from Republican rule. By the time the last federal troops had been withdrawn in 1877, Reconstruction was all but over and the Democratic Party* controlled the destiny of the South. 

The Dixiecrats

Southern "race voters" known as Dixiecrats switched en masse to the Republican party as the Democrats began to embrace the Civil Rights movement. In fact Lucinda's blog in the Topeka-Capital Journal has a thoughtful and insightful piece entitled "How the Dixiecrats Became Republicans."  I am excerpting part of it below:

I grew up and registered the first time into the old Democratic Party, which was a remnant of the old Dixiecrat Party. They hated blacks. They hated Jews. They hated Catholics. I grew up listening to it. I personally knew KKK members. In fact, a boy I dated had an older brother in the KKK (big time Democrats). That older brother's name is online in articles that talk about the Bogalusa Race Riots of the 60's. He had his white sheet on, with at least a half dozen other KKK members that worked for my father and were at our home a lot. He tried to pull a black man out of a car to beat him up and the black man shot him.

You certainly don't have to tell me about the old Dixiecrats. I lived amongst them.
Today those same people I knew who hated black people and Jews and hated everything about civil rights are all Republicans. They're not JUST  Republicans, they're far right extremists.

I get their emails almost daily - emails full of lies about Obama, with caricatures of Obama and his family - and so much more. Lies, hatred and ugliness that is hard to imagine that a person can carry around in his or her heart. . . Civil Rights laws passed in the 1950s and especially in the 1960s, were championed by NATIONAL Democrats, but caused splits in the Democratic Party. Many in the South switched allegiance to the Republican Party which was seen as more conservative. With Reagan the shift in the South was fairly complete.

 . . As long as your party harbors and gives sustenance to the old Dixiecrats (and they are, by far, no longer just in the south - Kansas is full of them) - your party is not going to win a presidential race, again. The Hispanics and the African Americans and the Asians have woken up. They know now how important a single vote can be. . . As a Republican, you need to ask yourselves, are you happy being a member of a party that rivals the old Dixiecrats and their Jim Crow laws and attitudes? If so, then stick with it all the way to the bottom, 'cause, my friends, you are going down.