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History Perverted

From: Bernhard1848@att.net

The following extract from the North Carolina branch, Southern Historical Society of 1875 describes the "media bias" of antebellum times, and the manipulation of news by demagogues to fit an agenda. Nothing has changed from then.

Bernhard Thuersam, Executive Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
Post Office Box 328
Wilmington, NC 28402
www.CFHI.net

History Perverted:

"For the past twenty-five years, the English people have obtained whatever information they possess concerning the progress of events in the United States from Northern sources. The leading newspapers of New York, Philadelphia and Boston are sent to England and contribute in a large degree to shape public sentiment in regard to the Southern people. One section has not the ear of the British public, and we have no organs there either to maintain our cause or to repel the attacks made upon us. The people of the North having an abundance of "greenbacks," go abroad in large numbers and of course carry with them their peculiar ideas, prejudices, antipathies and "isms."

In England their misrepresentations of the South are readily received, for the English people have long been antislavery in their views, at least since the days of Wilberforce. Anything therefore, that may be told prejudicial to the good name of slave-owners, or the defenders of the once "peculiar institution" is certain to be believed. English travelers in America generally confine their excursions to the Northern States and return to Europe without any accurate knowledge of the former slave-States, but crammed with false statements made by our enemies which they are prompt to retail or publish. When the war began the sympathies of the great mass of Englishmen were with our enemies; and they were only too glad when they heard that "slavocracy" was defeated and punished.

Since the war, we have rarely met with an utterance by a British politician, or read a paragraph in a British periodical or newspaper, that concerned the South that did not betray hostility, and, in most instances, palpable ignorance. The true causes, remote and immediate, that led to the war between the States are utterly unknown to most educated Englishmen. The views of Northern demagogues and newspaper partisans have been accepted as the truth in the matter, and the historical works from Northern pens, in which the origin of the war is given, have been credited in full however false and unfair. The result is our people are misunderstood, their motives are maligned and the whole course of history is perverted.

(The Northern writers do) not know that as early as 1809 and 1810, a dissolution of the Union was much thought of in the New England States, and that in 1811 Mr. Quincy of Massachusetts stated in Congress that if Louisiana was admitted as a State into the Union, that it would be "virtually a dissolution of the Union, that it would free all the States from any moral obligation to remain, and that it would be the duty of some to prepare for separation, amicably, if they can, violently if they must." Probably he knows nothing of the conduct of the New England States in the War of 1812 and the calling of the Hartford Convention when disunion was openly discussed and favored, simply because war would be injurious to the commercial interests of that section of the Union.

In his masterly defense of the Southern people made in the United States Senate, February 17, 1875---a speech that entitles him to the hearty thanks of every friend of our people and of constitutional government---Judge Merrimon, referring to the condition of affairs in 1861 said:

"They (the Southern people) owned five million of slaves worth more than two thousand million dollars; they had a strong and overruling apprehension, grounded upon long and fierce controversy, that a political party about to administer the government intended to destroy that property although it was recognized by the Constitution and secured by the system of government as much as any other property. So apprehending, they did not propose to make war on the Union, but to withdraw from it, as thousands believed they had a constitutional right to do, both North and South."

They merely proposed to do for good cause what New England had once claimed it had a right to do without any sufficient cause. We have written this of purpose to show that there is a great necessity for a masterly history of the war---one that shall be fair, painstaking and full. When the South shall produce some great historical writer who will tell the story as it is, and in a style that will attract as do the great productions of Macauley, Froude, Stanhope and Freeman, then we will secure an audience with the leading men of Europe and the truth will for the first time be told to them."
T. B. Kingsbury

(Our Living and Our Dead, Devoted to North Carolina---Her Past, Her Present, and Her Future. Official organ of the North Carolina Branch, Southern Historical Society. April, 1875

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