Students chatted in the lobby of the Hayti Heritage Center in Durham last week, waiting for class to begin. Their subject? The Civil War. Michael McElreath called them to attention.
McElreath works for the North Carolina History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation and Reconstruction. The new museum — planned to open in about two years — is working with the state to develop a new Civil War curriculum for students. His class last week consisted of a group of 19 teachers from across the region. Over the course of two days, McElreath would lead them on a tour of the historic Stagville Plantation, listen alongside them to academic talks on the Civil War, and take them on a stroll to the Durham History Museum.
On this particular day, Washington and Lee history professor Barton Myers talked about the often-overlooked North Carolina Unionists who resisted local Confederate rule.
"Now Jeremiah King, who was a white farmer from Henderson County, was arrested and jailed three weeks in Asheville by Capt. Morse in 1864 for his Unionist proclivities," Myers said. "His son Jason, who had been conscripted into the Confederate army, deserted only to join the U.S. Army."
When the $87 million North Carolina History Center opens in Fayetteville in 2027, it will be a “teaching” museum, drawing from scholars like Myers and first-hand records of the Civil War era to present what the center describes as a full, nuanced local history of the war and its aftermath. In the meantime, it’s hosting symposiums like this one for educators across the state. The goal is to send teachers back to their students with a more complete understanding of the Civil War.
“We essentially are trying to make sure that teachers have great access to the best scholarship about this era so they can teach honest history, fact-based history," McElreath said.
McElreath argues that’s necessary because the history of the Civil War has been so muddied by myths. And many of those myths still find their way into classrooms today.
For instance, while most historians agree that slavery was one of the main causes of the Civil War, McElreath says schools have historically emphasized other causes – like disagreements over the Constitution or the future of the U.S. economy.
“These things were true as well, but the war in every way was about slavery and the need to understand that is important, because we need to be honest about the causes of the war," he said.
Schools have long been at the forefront of debates over how slavery, the Civil War and the Reconstruction era should be remembered. In the wake of the war, Confederate sympathizers built the “Lost Cause” mythology – a series of widely-debunked narratives about the war that aimed to reframe the Confederacy as a noble endeavor. Many textbooks, particularly in the South, went on to carry those narratives – and some have lingered in contemporary education. A 2017 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center found only 8% of high school seniors nationwide identified slavery as one of the war’s central causes.
Charlie Harrell is a history teacher at CITI High School in Nash County who attended the event. He said understanding the war is important to understanding society today.
“The Civil War is sort of like the end of the beginning, and the beginning of the modern age, because of this whole Reconstruction idea – we have to change what we had been before. And it’s been 160 years, (but) we’re still struggling with some of that," Harrell said.
The Center, supported by state funding and private donations, says it hopes to use first-hand accounts of North Carolina residents to paint a fuller picture of the war’s impact on the state and its people. Teachers say those kinds of stories can help bring the subject matter to life for their students — stories such as the ones teachers heard on a nighttime tour of the historic Stagville Plantation in Durham. Sashir Moore-Sloan, a teacher at Jordan High School had been there before, but this time was different.
“Seeing it at night as an African-American woman, it was a different experience, and just seeing what our ancestors went through – and how dark it is – just, you know, walking through the slave quarters at night when it’s cold. It was a very different experience that I’ll never forget, and it’s something that I would definitely bring to my students and share and get into.”
Her cold walk through those slave quarters is one more reminder of how, 160 years later, the stories of the Civil War remain just as potent.
