Thread by @JYSexton

America's history has been intentionally and maliciously scrubbed clean of ugly, necessary truths.

Let's talk about the Civil War, the Confederacy, Lincoln, and why certain truths have been hidden.

Here's what I learned researching AMERICAN RULE.

1/

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611439/a…

We have to start with the run-up to the Civil War. I'm sure some of you were taught, like myself and others, that secession just kind of...happened.

There's not a lot of coverage or conversation about that, and it's because the subject is damning to the American project

2/

The reason we don't examine the lead-up to secession is because the truth lies in the framing of the country, and how the framers of the Constitution messed this up from the very beginning by giving political concessions to the South in exchange for ratification.

3/

The compromises the founders gave the South, in the form of representation of slaves and the Electoral College, ensured the South had outsized power.

Leading up to the Civil War, that control was troubled, and like all fascist movements losing power, they went full fascist.

4/

Make no mistake. The Confederacy was a white supremacist state founded on the principle of slavery.

They were more than happy to remain in the Union as long as their power base remained and slavery remained untroubled.

It was a racist dictatorship.

5/

As I've covered in the past, the Confederacy didn't view itself as a "new" country, but the continuation of America as it was designed.

They embraced George Washington and the other revolutionaries. They believed they were the REAL America.

6/

The Confederacy, like the Founding Fathers believed, was based on white supremacy as ordained by God.

This is why we don't look at the Confederacy more. It is a damning indictment of our Founding as well as proof of Christian, white fascism at play in America.

7/

As a result, the Confederate States of America just remain this weird aberration in our history books and curriculum.

It just...popped up, instead of being a continuation of white supremacist law and philosophy in the United States that went full fascist as it lost power.

8/

The Confederate States of America wasn't just some plantation wonderland. It was a legitimate fascistic state in philosophy and practice.

It shows, by its existence and organization, that America has been infected with fascism from the very beginning.

9/

But.

We cannot be honest about the Civil War, slavery, white supremacy, or American history unless we examine some things that make people uncomfortable.

We have to talk about Lincoln and the mythology that has been established around him.

10/

A note.

If being honest and forthcoming about Abraham Lincoln makes you uncomfortable, ask yourself why.

It's because we've turned him into an infallible religious figure instead of a living, breathing man who contained multitudes.

A reminder. Revolution is uncomfortable.

11/

Abraham Lincoln's public comments on race are problematic, even for the moment. As a younger man, he regularly supported white supremacy even as he questioned racism.

Our scrubbing of this record is problematic and dangerous

12/

In our desire to make Lincoln a paragon of American goodness, we have forgotten that even as the Civil War started he was very public about the fact that ending slavery was not his main goal or desire.

Lincoln evolved. He wasn't perfect.

13/

This statue in Boston of Lincoln "bestowing freedom" on a slave is from this mindset.

Lincoln wasn't a messiah. He wasn't a Christ-like figure. He was a politician who had complicated and often troubling views on slavery and race.

14/

The Emancipation Proclamation was one of the greatest moments in American history. A watershed that we should celebrate, but our desire to scrub clean white supremacy from our history has hidden from us necessary truths about slavery and race in America.

15/

Our race to hold up the narrative that Lincoln and the Union Army ended slavery has erased the fact that the North was INCREDIBLY racist and chock-full of white supremacy.

It also hides the efforts by black men and women who helped win their own freedom.

16/

For context, when Lincoln read the Emancipation to his cabinet, the first question was from his Attorney General Edward Bates, who agreed with it but said freed slaves had to be deported.

Lincoln agreed.

17/

Even as Lincoln worked to abolish slavery, he was meeting with luminaries like Frederick Douglass and telling them he didn't believe white and black people could live together.

Douglass shocked him by telling him freed slaves just wanted to be Americans.

18/

Lincoln's views on slavery, race, and white supremacy were evolving even as he was fighting the Civil War.

But he continued to believe freed slaves needed to be deported and worked feverishly to try and move them from America.

19/

We remember Lincoln's famous oratories, but we don't look at his speech of deportation, which was pushed by Emigration Commissioner James Mitchel, who worked with Lincoln to try and sell the freed slaves to England for deportation.

20/

The point here is not to undermine Lincoln's work, but to give an ACTUAL picture of what happened, a well-rounded depiction of how the Civil War didn't solve white supremacy

We hide these things because they're difficult and telling, because they're proof we have work to do

21/

Because Lincoln was assassinated, we'll never know how he might have evolved on white supremacy or race. Instead, he was made a martyr and his story was turned into a religious myth that proved America had been scrubbed clean in a baptism of blood.

22/

Lincoln's death made him an American messiah. Quickly a new Christian/nationalist faith emerged where Washington was the Father, Americanism the Holy Spirit, and Lincoln the Son/Messiah.

It was a mythical story of America that we've yet to escape and desperately need to.

23/

Frederick Douglass tired to tell Americans this when he spoke of Lincoln at a memorial, reminding them that, at best, that Lincoln was a "step-father" to Black Americans.

He warned against our instinct to make him a messiah or to believe white supremacy was over.

24/

In this mythology, the cessation of military violence in the Civil War meant that white supremacy was defeated and the Confederacy simply...evaporated.

But the Confederacy was absorbed into our laws, our politics, and our culture.

Nothing ended but the battles.

25/

This is why Reconstruction is barely covered in our history. Lincoln's Vice-President Andrew Johnson swept in, telling African Americans they were not equal, and installed avowed white supremacists as governors in the Southern states to restore "order."

26/

White supremacist governors like Florida's William Marvin told African Americans they should still refer to their masters as "master" and lectured that they were not actually free or equal.

He was only one in many as white supremacy simply became law and politics.

27/

Meanwhile, enforcement of white supremacy went underground and was hidden by the cover of night as paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan took over where the Confederate armies had left off.

White supremacy remained a deadly and constant institution.

28/

As president, US Grant fought the KKK and was a rabid opponent of white supremacy in laws and culture.

But he was also a slaveholder for awhile, which reminds us to always remember that we can't look at everything through a good/bad dynamic. All of this is complicated.

29/

Attempts to "flatten out" our history and remove context are the work of people like Woodrow Wilson, an avowed and disgusting white supremacist whose histories revised the Civil War, lionized the South, and gave us our new myth of "the Lost Cause."

30/

Woodrow Wilson's "histories" inspired these racist mythologies, including Birth of a Nation and other projects that completely changed what actually happened and portrayed it as a matter of "State's Rights" and the whole thing as a misunderstanding.

31/

Wilson's mythology of the Lost Cause portrayed the South as a lovely world where African Americans were watched over by benevolent slave masters and white supremacy was necessary because "lesser races" needed guided and protected from manipulation.

This continues today.

32/

Wilson's revised history was incredibly popular because it made Americans feel better about themselves and because he used an army of propagandists to scrub American history clean so it could emerge from World War I as the world's foremost champion of liberty.

33/

It's no coincidence that many of the Confederate monuments that are being toppled today emerged after Wilson's revised history.

It brought the Confederacy back into the public sphere and made it a matter of "heritage" and "not hate."

It was a lie. A lie for power.

34/

This is why you have this mythology around people like Robert E. Lee, one of the foremost warriors for white supremacy.

Suddenly he's noble.

Suddenly he's not so bad.

Suddenly you're empathizing with a literal white supremacist dictatorship.

It's a ruse. A massive lie.

35/

The Confederacy survived in our laws, our politics, and our customs, and it spread across America as conservative politicians continued to divide us by race.

This is why the flag has remained and spread like a virus. We didn't eradicate white supremacy. It just hid itself.

36/

This mythologized history, this lie where American was baptized in blood and white supremacy and the Confederacy simply "disappeared" is a weapon against real change.

When oppressed people protest, they're told America isn't racist. It was cured.

37/

This is how white supremacy protects itself. It tells you it doesn't exist, feeds you an altered history, a weaponized lie, tells you everything has already been solved.

And meanwhile, it replicates and grows and spreads through our law and our culture.

38/

This is the history that historians recognize. It just so happens that experts and realists are shouted down and held away from textbooks, curriculum, and open and wide discussion.

It's a result of the war on education and white supremacist machinations.

39/

The mythologized history you've been taught is mythologized, shaped, and crafted for a reason.

It hides our complicated, nuanced history, and the fact that white supremacy is our legacy and story and remains a constant threat.

We have to get serious and examine our past.

40/40