Last semester was my first college semester and I moved from New York to Tennessee. I was taking Early US History and on the first day of classes the professor gave a spiel about how the South "actually won" the Civil War and he was trying really hard to spin it that way, arguing something about how slavery was going to end anyway and something about policies that were enacted following the war lining up more with what the Confederacy wanted. He was really pushing it though on convoluted technicalities and it kind of rubbed me the wrong way since that's definitely not what I've been historically taught. I knew some Southerners were a bit out of their minds on this subject. I felt bad that these students have to be taught "we lost" in a fancy way, I just didn't think the teacher would be so in denial over it. Should I just chalk it up to human nature and being uncomfortable at the prospect of defeat?
I made the choice to drop that class. He was kind of a nasty, older guy anyhow (I am gay so to be a man and make me dislike you takes like a considerable effort). He teaches like 10+ classes at 4 different schools and told us if we had to use the bathroom to not bother coming back lol. I still have my textbook and I'm re-taking the course online with a different professor this semester. Just wondering if anyone can shine some light on this and if you think I made the right call or not?
It is incorrect to say that the South won the US Civil War. The South most definitely lost militarily, and the central conflict of the war - the perpetuation of slavery in the United States - was resolved with the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865.
However, there is some truth in the idea that racist policies enacted by many states in the years after the war (particularly, though not exclusively, in the South) perpetuated a racial caste system in the United States. In this sense, one could argue that the South won a significant long-term political victory that undid many of the consequences of the Union's victory in the Civil War.
In the years after the end of the Civil War, the federal government passed laws and constitutional amendments designed to provide basic civil rights for black Americans, including the formerly enslaved. This period is known as Reconstruction (1865-1877). During this era the federal government actively used the U.S. military to defend the civil rights of black Americans in the South and protect them from the racial terror of groups like the Ku Klux Klan. However, after 1877, political maneuvering at the federal level resulted in an extremely lenient policy towards the Southern states, leading to the rise of Jim Crow segregation and other racist policies and practices that continued for much of the next century. Many of the immense social and political changes brought about in the years after the Civil War were undone following the end of Reconstruction. The Southern states were able to reestablish a racial caste system that treated black Americans as second-class citizens (if it can be said to have treated them as citizens at all).
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s successfully dismantled much of the legal framework that allowed legal segregation and racial disenfranchisement, though racial disparities persisted in a number of areas. Without getting too far into present-day politics, suffice it to say that we are still reckoning with many of the political consequences of the Civil War today.
I think the argument about slavery being doomed is wrong. That's not what secessionists thought. They believed that slavery was the future and it was the free labor economies of the North and Europe that were doomed. This was the point Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the confederacy made in the "cornerstone speech" at the founding of the Confederacy. Stephens argued that eventually the whole world would come to see that racial slavery was the best possible system. Slavery wasn't in decline in the South, it was actually a dynamic growing institution which generated huge amounts of wealth. It was the Civil War that sealed the fate of slavery, not just in the US but in places like Cuba and Brazil as well. Assuming slavery was doomed is an example of teleological thinking-assuming that what occurred had to occur.
I suspect your decision to drop the class was a good one. Perhaps there was a kernel of a reasonable argument there, but it seems like a strange way to start the class and a good professor would have been able to explain what he meant better than this guy seems to have.