They say history is written by the victors, but that ain't necessarily so. In the United States, the education of children is a responsibility of the individual states, and this shows up most obviously in how the history of our Civil War is taught. If you are of a certain age, what you learned was largely dependent on which state you were in.
Vox takes a look at how a deliberate push for "The Lost Cause" by a group called the United Daughters of the Confederacy affected educational materials that have shaped opinions for decades ...and left effects we still feel 150 years after the war.
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The immediate cause of the war was the secession of the southern states. Their reasons for breaking away are clearly detailed in each state's Declaration of Secession. You really only need to read the first few lines of each one.
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I attended public schools in my home state of CT as well as a few years in SD. Both states pushed that the main factors of the civil war were political and economical and that slavery only got mixed up in the equation once the emancipation proclamation was signed in 1863, 2 years into the war. I've never done much research on my own (American history and especially war history has always bored the Dickens out of me) but that's something I think i'll look into.
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I grew up in Kentucky, a border state, meaning it was a slave state that did not secede with the Confederacy. In school we had textbooks produced for nationwide use that addressed slavery as the main reason for the secession. But teachers made it clear that if we wanted to pass the test, the reason for the war was "state's rights." Still, we knew better. It was an early lesson in political disconnect from reality.
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