American Civil War history is being rewritten. Although most couldn’t guess, within a decade when the Civil War began and ended (much less on the details of the conflict), many influential people want society to believe the war between the states was a “right vs. wrong” fight over slavery (not Northern aggression).

Abraham Lincoln wasn’t the “Moses” for slaves many want to make him as. He advocated for slaves to be shipped back to Africa.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was a calculated risk advanced to win the war more than to free people.

Lincoln unleashed Sherman’s army to make war on Southern women and children. That chapter of history always gets skipped over in class.

Had the South freed the slaves before firing on Fort Sumter, their fight for independence would have been more assured.

Freeing the slaves wasn’t first and foremost for Lincoln, nor was keeping slaves first and foremost for the south.

The Confederate states wanted freedom from an overbearing Northern government ever ramping up taxes and influence. The southern states finally rebelled and were labeled as “rebels.”

The Confederate flag became a symbol of rebellion during and after the war. Anytime any racist group wanted an instant emblem of rebellion, they adopted the Confederate battle flag, perverting the true meaning of the “stars and bars” for which hundreds of thousands of Southerners gave their lives.

Since hate mongers have (successfully) besmirched the Confederate flag, sullied it for causes that were not part of the Confederate fight for independence, spineless officials have caved in to the rantings of the “historically challenged” masses and begun a crusade to remove Southern Civil War monuments.

Confederate history has now been reduced to national shame and rebuke.

A frenzy of historical revisionists are blindly lashing out at Civil War monuments.

These people are as historically inept as those who use the Confederate flag to promote their racist convictions.

Now we have the historically ignorant influencing the historically ignorant to inaccurately indoctrinate future generations on what the Civil War was all about.

Karl Schmidt lives in Prince Edward County. His email address is tenbears@centurylink.net.