Civil War Effects

The Civil War has made a huge impact even to this day. It brings up the Confederate flag, Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address, and slavery. Since the Civil War is such a complex war, questions still appear if the war was about slavery or the state’s rights. In Lincoln’s second inaugural address, it says that slavery is what it comes down to for everything. David Blight wrote a book that described the desire for the South and the North. The South’s was industry and the North’s was to make money. Because of this, the causes of the war was ignored. A twenty thousand women group called the, “United Daughters of the Confederacy” was dedicated to educational and historical conservancy causes. The UDC began a “Children of the Confederacy” in 1995.

A school principal named Mildred Lewis Rutherford, ensures the young people what the war was about and the reason that it happened. Before the Civil War, education was private or a local affair. After the Civil War, education began to spread and the first federal agency was authorized by President Grant in 1867. Congress was passing laws to establish a national education system. Because of the “false accusations of the Civil War”, the Southerners were determined to prevent students from hearing these accusations from the outsiders. The UDC members made sure that in Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida was to prevent textbooks that had anything horrible or the assumptions in the Lost Cause about the South. They only wanted the heroic things about the South and the rest banned. To prevent this, the UDC sorted textbooks into three categories: texts written by Northerners and blatantly unfair to the South; texts that were “apparently fair” but were still suspect because they were written by Northerners; and works by Southern writers. The novel, “Gone With the Wind” had a perspective about the South that has had more influence than any