Don't you wonder where some of the TEA Party "patriots" and holdover States Rights' Dixiecrats get some of their unusual ideas about both the Constitution and the causes of the Civil War? Wonder no more. A lot of your fellow citizens (aged 50+) learned it in their Alabama History books.

I recently happened upon a copy of Charles Grayson Summersell's 1961 textbook: Alabama History for Schools. While thumbing through the text, I was introduced to a totally alternate reality: one that should have been totally discarded a LONG time ago.

It's a world where benevolent Alabama slave owners treated slaves better than "Northern slave traders," slaves received "the very best medical care," were covered by an early version of Social Security, secession was forced on the South by the "vocal minority of abolitionists" in the North, and those Southern secessionists were merely upholding their rights under the US Constitution.

if you're lucky enough to have the book, start on page 229 (PDF copy here). .... I might should say "if you're UNlucky enough to have this book" - except that the value may skyrocket if the TEA partiers start looking for copies to wave as examples in front of publishers and legislators.

"Most of the slave trading ships were owned and operated by Northerners. While the Negro was badly treated as a rule in the foreign slave trade, he was generally very well treated by Alabama farmers."A few slaves were lucky enough to get castoff clothes from the big house. In clothing, as in food and housing, the slave enjoyed little or no luxury but suffered little or no want.

"In one respect, the slave was almost always better off than free laborers, white or black, of the same period. The slave received the best medical care which the times could offer. There are plantation records which show large sums spent on doctors' bills for the care of slaves. The ill health of the slave meant a loss of working time to the master, and the death of a slave was a great economic loss"
http://www.leftinalabama.com/diary/7621/lies-my-alabama-history-book-told-me-part-1-slavery-as-social-security

In 1980, a U.S. District Court ruled that Mississippi students deserved another version of history, and approved
the revisionist history textbook Mississippi: conflict and change by James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis. Until then the adopted textbooks shielded Mississippi students from the realities of their past, provided a whitewashed narrative that degraded African Americans and championed many of the wrong causes and heroes.

In 1962, (Govornor) Barnett exercised his new role in the public schools and selected John K. Bettersworth’sbook Mississippi: a History as the only state-approved choice for the required Mississippi history course. Bettersworth specialized in the Civil War, and his narrative seemed stuck in the same Old South and Lost Cause mentality. From 1962 through 1980, all Mississippi students learned from Bettersworth’s texts.
....
As a result, the white South could stall the integration of their history even after the integration of
their schools “White southerners had been the most visible obstacle to the racial integration of schoolbook history,” Joseph Moreau explained. Changes were slower in the South, because deep-rooted ideologies of white supremacy, racism, and the “southern way of life,” took longer to overcome. Mississippi textbook authors continued writing “whites only” history well into the 1970s and some into the 1980s. New research debunked the “magnolia myths” regarding slavery, Reconstruction, and civil rights, but Mississippi students had no alternative to this outdated history until at least 1980.
http://mdah.state.ms.us/pubs/davis_race-in-textbooks.pdf