I grew up all over America. I was born in Colorado, lived in south Georgia for 5 years, a couple of different places in Oklahoma over 6 years, and finally North Carolina, where I’ve been since 1990. The South has always been a place of wonder for me – men still adhere to an honor code (even if they don’t know it), and there’s a nobleness to the way they tell their history about the bravery it takes to tame such lands, and the courage of their ancestors to stand up to a great oppressor.
Except that most of that history is a lie. A lie about history, about race, about who we are as a country and how we got here. These myths shaped me and society at large, creating biases and blind spots that we all carry. This is the story of how I came to see through these myths and why telling the truth about American Civil War is essential – not just for me, but for all of us.
I was young when we lived in south Georgia in the 1980’s, too young to understand history or hate, and I remember the bus for my private, Christian elementary school would drive through a black neighborhood and all the white kids on the back of the bus would hang their heads out the window and yell n-bombs at anybody standing outside. My family was southern, but I’d moved here from Colorado when I was 4 so this scene was strange to me. We didn’t drive through that neighborhood the whole year – eventually the bus was attacked with projectiles after a kid on the bus had hit someone in the head with a sparkplug. I was too young to understand it then, but the American South is a place still clinging on to legends and myths.
After a few years in the Midwest, where racism exists but it’s not as out and proud because the only people around are people that look like you, we moved to Eastern North Carolina. I started my 8th grade year in Onslow County Public Schools.
North Carolina was and is so very different from the Midwest, and I was old enough to catch and understand the differences. First, it’s so damn hot and humid. Just…my God. Second, the minority population compared to Oklahoma was…dizzying? This was a military town, so people from everywhere went to school here. So many colors, styles, different sounds.
My first class was homeroom / North Carolina History. I loved, and still love, history and was excited by the syllabus – Native Americans in NC (huge for a kid coming from Oklahoma), NC natural history, the American Civil War…all exciting stuff. The Civil War especially – I knew it was about slavery but hadn’t really learned any details in previous schooling.
First day of class, the teacher, an old southern white lady native to eastern NC, was reviewing the syllabus. When we got to the Civil War part, she very proudly and loudly said “Your syllabus refers to a period of American history as the Civil War. In my classroom, we’ll refer to that period as The War of Northern Aggression.” My little brain freaked out – The War of Northern Aggression? The North went to war to preserve the Union and free the slaves. What the hell is the War of Northern Aggression?
For 5 years, whether in school, church, or around the neighborhood, the myths and lies that, in part at least, keep Southern society afloat, were slowly and methodically poured into me.
5 years later, I’m a senior in high school in North Carolina. I drive an old pickup with a couple of rebel flag stickers in the back window. Had a rebel flag on the wall in my bedroom. Our senior trip was to Washington DC – while I was there, a friend and I found a stand selling Rebel flags (in Washington DC…the Capitol of the nation that defeated the Confederacy…), bought one and excitedly returned to our hotel room to show all our classmates. A pair of black classmates saw the flag, looked at me with real hurt in their eyes and said, “Really, Charlie?” Their hurt and disappointment confused me – I’d been taught for 5 years now that the Civil War wasn’t about racism or slavery, it was about States’ Rights. Who can be upset about that?
The question I should have asked is – how did a kid from the Midwest who didn’t even understand the south 5 years ago come to adopt hate symbols from more than a century before?
The answer is easy – Indoctrination and Ignorance.
And that ignorance festered and became a foundational part of who I was and how I identified. I was Southern, by God, from the people proud enough to stand up to tyranny even though they knew they’d lose everything in the process. We were noble, we were proud, and we were unstoppable.
I graduated High School and moved onto college, where I proceeded to fail in ways so epic and spectacular they are told as legends on the campus of East Carolina University to this day. I failed out of college and had to get a job. I failed to get a good job and spent the next 3 years working shit hours for shit pay in a shitty apartment.
And I was angry about my failure. It wasn’t because I partied too hard, didn’t go to class, and generally made no effort to better myself after High School. It was because I was Southern, and the world was against me. People that didn’t look like me were successful because the system was rigged and had been for years. Blah blah blah blah. Eventually I got my head out of my ass, finished college and started a career.
If you’ve gotten to this point and, in the back of your mind, you’re hanging on for dear life waiting for the epiphany moment, the big ah-ha that changed my life, well I’m sorry. Just like the indoctrination into the cult of the Lost Cause (and many other American History myths we’re likely to explore), the reverse was a slow trickle of real-world truths and study.
I got married and raised kids. We went on cheap cruise vacations where we explored the Caribbean. I’d be on some random island I’d never heard of, look it up on Wikipedia and read the awful history of the slave trade there and elimination of the natives. Or, as I worked in local government, I could see the hidden yet insidious ways some ordinances are designed to exclude people. Whatever it was, it was a slow trickle of unwinding myths and lies.
By the time of COVID, my views on race had modernized. I’d seen, been, and done enough to know that I wasn’t special and that everybody has something to contribute, but I still struggled with history. I struggled with what little I actually knew about the Civil War against what I was taught. I struggled with the idea that we had fought to cleanse our sordid past for a brighter future while watching what seemed to be the same old fights being fought over and over again.
Like most of us, I was looking for any way to escape reality in 2020 and 2021. One night, I was doomscrolling TikTok when I saw a 15-second video for The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the War and Why the North Won by Edward H. Bonekemper II and the voiceover said “If you want to know how we got here, read this. It’s also an Audiobook.”
So I downloaded the Audiobook (the narrator is tough, so prepare yourself if you go that route) and in 9 hours and 3 minutes my entire foundation was rocked. One by one it challenged the basic ‘facts’ I ‘knew’ about the Civil War. And after that foundation of myths, lies, and hate was destroyed, I went looking for the truth.
That’s what we’re going to do here – present the lie, tell the truth, and then show how it led us to modern America. History is usually told by the victors, but somehow the losers framed the American Civil War. Join me as we take back our truth, the American truth.
SO WHAT ABOUT HISTORY? 
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