Segregationists used the memory of slavery and the Civil War as a political tool to oppose desegregation in the southern United States. Politicians like George Wallace and the Dixiecrats used the guise of states rights to justify legal discrimination against Black Americans. The states rights rhetoric is explicitly tied to the white southerners’ memory of slavery and the Civil War —a memory these politicians appropriated to serve their cause. Wallace himself compared the Confederacy to the original founding fathers and their rebellion against colonial rule, fighting not to continue the institution of slavery, but rather to preserve liberty. There was a change in the popular memory, and a removal of Black Americans from the narrative, which
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The theatrical adaption of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which he saw in 1901 angered him; the play, in his view, depicted Black Americans in too positive a light. Dixon wrote that: “My object is to teach the North, the young North, what it has never known-the awful suffering of the white man during the dreadful Reconstruction period. I believe that Almighty God anointed the white men of the South by their suffering during that time . . . to demonstrate to the world that the white man must and shall be supreme.” Like Dixon before him Lyon Gardiner Tyler, a Virginian historian, sought to educate what he believed to be a misinformed public in his Catechism of the Confederacy. The pamphlet was first published in 1920. Tyler’s booklet is indicative of the shift in Southern memory and justification of the Civil War, and of the pivot away from the unadulterated racism of Dixon to the more subtle political rhetoric to …show more content…
Lyon Gardiner Tyler was both a historian and a former president of the College of William and Mary. His pamphlet is a more accessible summation of the arguments found in his and other Southern intellectuals’ justifications the Civil War and the role of slavery and black people in Southern history. Tyler considered himself a defender of the South’s cause and saw himself on a one man mission to challenge and correct what he perceived to be Northern myth-making surrounding the war, slavery and President
The theatrical adaption of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which he saw in 1901 angered him; the play, in his view, depicted Black Americans in too positive a light. Dixon wrote that: “My object is to teach the North, the young North, what it has never known-the awful suffering of the white man during the dreadful Reconstruction period. I believe that Almighty God anointed the white men of the South by their suffering during that time . . . to demonstrate to the world that the white man must and shall be supreme.” Like Dixon before him Lyon Gardiner Tyler, a Virginian historian, sought to educate what he believed to be a misinformed public in his Catechism of the Confederacy. The pamphlet was first published in 1920. Tyler’s booklet is indicative of the shift in Southern memory and justification of the Civil War, and of the pivot away from the unadulterated racism of Dixon to the more subtle political rhetoric to …show more content…
Lyon Gardiner Tyler was both a historian and a former president of the College of William and Mary. His pamphlet is a more accessible summation of the arguments found in his and other Southern intellectuals’ justifications the Civil War and the role of slavery and black people in Southern history. Tyler considered himself a defender of the South’s cause and saw himself on a one man mission to challenge and correct what he perceived to be Northern myth-making surrounding the war, slavery and President