These days, opposing views of history are a prominent feature of politics all over the world, but are especially so here in the United States. Sometimes the same event is understood in such different ways that it seems like two separate events.

Take the Alamo, the place in Texas stormed in 1836 by the Mexican army which massacred about 180 Texans. The iconic Texan views is that these men were patriots, who were martyrs for Texas independence and then for Texas to join the union.

But the Mexican view is different. Spanish and then Mexican administrators wanted settlers in Texas to form a screen against the very formidable Comanche Indian raids. They invited in settlers on
several conditions–that they swear loyalty to Mexico, convert to Catholicism, learn Spanish and not bring in slaves. The surge of settlers coming into Texas in the late 1820s and early 1830s ignored all four
conditions. The Mexicans insisted, the Texans did not change rebellion ensued, and Mexican troops went into Texas to quash the rebellion.

So from one point of view, the 180 men who died at the Alamo were patriots and martyrs against tyranny. From the other, they were traitors and troublemakers. Texans don’t remember the 600 or so Mexican soldiers who died there, too. Who’s right? Where those men at the Alamo martyrs, or did they betray their country, Mexico?

The American Civil War of 1861-65 cost about 750,000 lives, the costliest war Americans have ever been involved in. 11 Southern states left the union and formed an alliance and called it the Confederacy. The South had 8 million white people and 4 million slaves. The North had about 20 million people and most of the industry. The South fought stubbornly and sometimes brilliantly, and lost anyway.

But what was the war about? The Confederates claimed to be acting like the American founding generation that fought an oppressive Britain, claiming that the North had abandoned the founding principles of liberty. The South claimed to be fighting for freedom and for the right of states to set their own policies. The North claimed to be fighting to free the slaves and restore the union, although racial discrimination was pervasive in the North as well, just not in the form of slavery.

These days, many Southerners and many conservatives are claiming that the Civil War was not about slavery but about the rights of states to establish their own policies. Liberals insist that the war was indeed about slavery.

The debate remains furious. One set of issues is about all the Confederate statues and memorials that dotted many southern towns and cities. Many Southerners see those as memorials to courage and valiant service in the cause of freedom. Many Northerners see them as memorials to
traitors and slave owners. Most of those memorials were in fact built in the decades around 1900 as part of what historians call the “lost cause” myth that emphasized Confederate honor and courage and Northern oppression and brutality. They were not erected in the immediate aftermath of the war. The myth ignores slavery for the most part, and saw the dozen years following the war, called “Reconstruction,” as an evil time in which Northern carpetbaggers used ignorant Black people to make money and achieve power. They also turned Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general commanding the Army of Northern Virginia, into a saint and turned Union General Sherman into a thug because of his “march through Georgia.”

Many Northerners disagreed and recently, those memorials to Confederates have become increasingly seen as honoring traitors and slaveholders, and called for them to be pulled down. The same is happening to many military bases in the South, named after Confederate generals and heroes, with names being changed to less controversial ones.

There is no doubt that Confederates fought well, with splendid courage and that many of them thought they were defending their homes and not defending slavery.

So who’s right? Are those statues of morally upright men or are they men who fought well in an evil cause, like Germany’s SS troops? Is General Robert E. Lee a model of a Christian gentleman, or is he a traitor who betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution?

Many Southerners do not use the term “Civil War,” but instead call it “The War of Northern Aggression.” In its time, it was called neither, but “The War Between the States.” Currently, history in the U.S. is often like this, disputed. The basic facts can’t change, but the interpretations can, and do.

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