The ‘Civil War’ Is a Lie. Let’s Call It the ‘Slaveholders’ Rebellion’ Again.
To face our own history, we must be honest about it.
Mr. Conwright is a writer focused on U.S. history.
In a written statement on the anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, President Trump described the Confederacy’s defeat in 1865 as the end of “four brutal years of suffering.” Rather than condemn the Confederacy’s treason or name slavery as the cause for which it fought, Mr. Trump quoted Ulysses Grant’s remarks to the vanquished army: “The war is over. The rebels are our countrymen again.”
Rebranding rebellion is nothing new. Americans take it for granted that the war between the Confederate states and the Union was always called the Civil War, but it was not. During the war and in its aftermath, it was primarily called an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Its current name is a result of decades of lobbying by Confederate heritage groups and white Southerners committed to rejuvenating the South’s image and ignoring its treason and slaveholding.
As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language?
In the war’s early years, the South’s rebelliousness was emphasized in part as a legal necessity. Congress was underlining the president’s constitutional authority to call forth the militia to suppress the Southern revolt. But in the decades after Lee’s surrender, Confederate heritage groups lobbied Congress, educators and the broader public to adopt a name for the war that avoided calling the Southerners “rebels.”
The use of “Slaveholders’ Rebellion” began early. Senator Samuel Pomeroy’s July 1861 bill to “ suppress the slaveholders’ rebellion ” was one instance. But the language was subject to debate. One senator who later defected to the Confederacy said it created “odium and prejudice against a particular interest” — that is, slavery.