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Teaching Secession and the Civil War in Scotland
Paul Quigley
| When I moved from North Carolina to Scotland two years ago, I was not especially worried about culture shock. I had grown up in northern England, only a couple of hundred miles away from Edinburgh, where I was to take up a position teaching U.S. history. But I did anticipate—with mixed feelings—a sort of pedagogical culture shock. Having completed my Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and having taught my first few courses in its vicinity, I was used to seeing American history through American eyes, or at least presenting it to American audiences. But what about teaching the subject in an Edinburgh classroom? With only hazy recollections of how American history had looked from my perspective as a British undergraduate years earlier, I worried. Would I pitch my lectures and discussions to the wrong level? Would I make the mistake of assuming too much prior knowledge? Or too little? |
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My main areas of expertise, secession and the Civil War, presented special concerns. In North Carolina there had been no need to think about the basics. Students knew what the Civil War was, when it had happened, who had won. They knew there was a North and a South, that the two had fought, that the Union had been preserved and slavery abolished, that the legacies of the conflict continued to influence American identity, politics, and culture. But British students might need to be led through much of this from scratch. |
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But as I prepared for my move, the results of the 2007 elections in the United Kingdom awakened me to the potential benefits of teaching the Civil War in Scotland. That year, the Scottish National party (SNP) won a plurality of seats in the Scottish parliament and SNP leader Alex Salmond became first minister. I would be teaching about secession and its consequences in a country whose own secession movement had just received a major boost. Think of the possibilities for cross-fertilization! My students and I would be continuing an old tradition of drawing connections between Scotland and the Confederacy. Mark Twain went a little far in Life on the Mississippi (1883) when he blamed the Civil War on Sir Walter Scott, but the link was not completely groundless. Some white southerners had been captivated by Scott's romances of noble Scots fighting against oppression. Confederates took further inspiration from Scotland in their battle flag—a more colorful, star-studded version of the blue-and-white St. Andrew's cross. More recently, their neo-Confederate descendants have claimed a Scottish connection too. Encouraged by Grady McWhiney's thesis of a neat cultural continuity from Britain's Celtic periphery to the American South, neo-Confederates have claimed a Scottish heritage that in their eyes bolsters their political agenda. They even persuaded the Scottish Tartans Authority to authorize a Confederate memorial tartan. And it was Mississippi senator Trent Lott who spearheaded the creation of an annual "Tartan Day" in the United States.1 Tenuous as they were, the historic links between Scotland and the American South could work to my advantage in the classroom. Imagine the insightful, animated, even effervescent discussions we would have about Southern secession—surrounded ourselves by a secession movement in full swing. |
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Unfortunately, imagining such classroom exchanges was as far as my plans went. On numerous occasions I have encouraged my students to compare Scotland's separatism with the South's—to little avail. It is not that they are uninterested in Southern secession; it is more that they are uninterested in the SNP's crusade, viewing it as a pipe dream. (Many of my students are English; the city of Edinburgh, and especially its university, is a type of genteel colony for the well-heeled citizens of southern England.) In any case, my hopes for stimulating classroom discussions were dashed. I realized that instructors can assume too much about the influence of contemporary contexts on their students' engagement with the past. |
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