We did not disfranchise the negroes until 1895. Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disenfranchising as many of them as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina today as in any State of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them, the worse off he got. As to his “rights” – I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern the white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.<a href="#footnotes" name="_ftnref6" target="_top"><sup id="footnote6">6</sup></a> I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores. . . .

Lost Cause ideology, an alternative explanation for the Civil War developed by white Southerners after the war’s end, seeks to rationalize the Confederacy.

This website can help you to better understand Confederate monuments and the context in which they were created. Start with the historical introduction, which includes information about who erected the monuments, along with when, where, and why.

How the facts of American history have in the last half century been falsified because the nation was ashamed. The South was ashamed because it fought to perpetuate human slavery. The North was ashamed because it had to call in the black men to save the Union, abolish slavery and establish democracy.