The Roots of Complicity

For generations of American schoolchildren, one version of their country's painful reckoning with its past seemed inarguable. The Southern states, it was almost universally taught, established, maintained and profited immensely from slavery. America's "peculiar institution" was ended, according to U.S. history textbooks, only after a morally outraged coalition of abolitionists and the election of the anti-slavery Abraham Lincoln gave the South no choice but to secede. In many respects, the stubborn legacy of those regional divisions - Sunbelt vs. Frost Belt, red state vs. blue - persists and continues to bedevil our politics today. Meanwhile, the myth also persisted that the North, in large part, had refused to participate in slavery and acquitted itself of responsibility by sacrificing its sons during the Civil War. more...

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