As I was saying...

Battle of Cowpens

...regarding  the American Revolution and the reason why everyone learned about the crossing of the Delaware and the Battle of Bunker Hill but not the battles of Cow Pens, or Kings Mountain was because of pure prejudice.  The writers, publishers and printers were (and still are for the most part) all located in the industrialized North but most experts now agree that without the victories Southern soldiers won in the South, the Revolutionary war would have taken a lot longer to win....and perhaps would have been lost.

But we are all human, even Historians,  so pure objectivity continues to be  elusive.

For example, most educated Americans, even the intelligent ones, believe that the Civil War was about slavery.  That was certainly an issue, but only  the best known of the issues.

It was about States Rights.

Seventy-five percent of white Southern families did not own slaves.

Half of all slave owners owned only one to five slaves.

The Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave...and caused draft riots in the North.

Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee expected slavery to fade away naturally.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that Racism was far more prevalent in the North than in the South.

Southern secession in 1861 was better founded in law than the secession of the American colonies in 1776   That's the reason the Feds didn't put Jefferson Davis on trial after the war.

And my point is?

Don't expect tomorrow's historians to get it right any more than their predecessors did. Don't be surprised if you come back 100 years in the future and read about how happy the American people were to be relieved of the burden of that hated, outdated Dead White Man's document called the Constitution. There will be pictures of happy Americans in their communes and long lines of smiling,
grateful subjects (even some mortally ill)  waiting patiently for admittance to hospital emergency rooms.  There will also be photos of tourists admiring the new Mount Rushmore, featuring only one President; the one who transformed a formally backward country into his vision of greatness.  -Ed


Civil war facts and statistics were taken from H.W.Crocker's book
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War