Revisionist historians exploit the general lack of knowledge of the public in order to promote their agenda. Sometimes errors are written and repeated as fact, but it is also true that more sinister motives are used to promote and change history about movements and events. Here are some examples of inaccurate reporting, omission, fiction, and innuendo.
In 1619, John Rolfe was the secretary and recorder general for the Virginia Company. He recorded the arrival of a Dutch man-of-war ship, “About the latter end of August…He bought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes…bought for victuals…at the best and easiest rate they could buy.” John Rolfe was incorrect, the ship was not Dutch but the English White Lion, the commander was John Colwyn Jupe, so on the slim basis of reporting by Rolfe, describing the bartering of “twenty and odd Negroes,” the 400-year history of slavery began in the colonies. Actually, these 20 Negroes were treated as indentured servants and one, Anthony Johnson, became a wealthy landowner.
Historians would have you believe that the Founding Fathers were atheists, agnostics, and deists. In the reprint of an 1848 original book, Lives of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, it is clear that these men were the instruments of Providence – faith and political wisdom guided them. Their writings confirmed their beliefs and counter revisionists use omission, broad generalizations, innuendos, and fiction to distort history to sway public opinion concerning the Founding Fathers. Let’s look at an example of omission: Kenneth C. Davis changed the meaning of a Patrick Henry quote by omitting four words. “If life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery…I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.” It should read: “If life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
Some history teachers tell students that the Civil War was not about slavery but states’ rights. Nine Southern states had secession documents that contained their desire to preserve slavery. Two other states, North Carolina and Tennessee later joined the Slave-Holding Confederate States of America. Here is an excerpt from the South Carolina secession document: [A]n increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding [i.e., northern] states to the institution of slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations…[T]hey have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery…They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes [through the underground railroad] …A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the states north of that line that united in the election of a man to the high office of the President of the United States [Abraham Lincoln] whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery…he has declared that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free”…The slaveholding states will no longer have the power of self-government or self-protection over the issue of slavery.These Southern secession documents unquestionably support that the South’s wish to preserve slavery was the driving force in its secession and thus the primary cause of the Civil War.
The Democratic Party uses race baiting and innuendo to accuse the Republican Party of the KKK, segregation, Jim Crow, voter suppression; but the Democratic Party is responsible for these actions. How is it possible to alter history like this? Joseph Goebbels said it best in his diary,“A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”