Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s decision to block a draft version of an AP African American history course, and College Board’s subsequent decision to amend the course, have elicited cries that DeSantis is keeping students from knowing the real (ostensibly racist) history of the United States.

Over at the Washington Post, Adam Laats declares that “by making it unacceptable to teach the truth of America’s racial history — even when the historical facts are unambiguous — conservatives have managed to ensure that students learn even less.”

Unsurprisingly, Laats didn’t stop with arguing that conservatives are trying to hide history. Instead, he resorted to the now routine tendency to associate any policy unpopular on the Left with the Confederacy, and later the KKK, noting, “In the 1920s, White conservatives in organizations such as the American Legion and the Ku Klux Klan expanded this campaign across the entire country.”

And yet, Laats undercuts his case that this is some sort of post-Confederate legacy by noting that “states such as Wisconsin, Oregon, New York, and New Jersey passed laws or considered bills to ban books” their respective legislatures viewed as inappropriate for high schoolers or inconsistent with the civil catechesis of those respective states.

Textbooks that sought to center slaveholding and racism were generally rejected: “In the eyes of conservatives in organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, American Legion, and Ku Klux Klan, such questioning was anathema, a treasonous attack on America’s uniquely heroic past.” Laats also appears infuriated that conservatives might offer a different reading of America’s past.

Laats's association of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion — a group that included scores of black American chapters in the years after its founding in 1919 — with the Klu Klux Klan and his rendering the Klan’s commitments as “conservative” betray the unseriousness of his charge that DeSantis’s decision is downstream from the Confederacy.

When the conflict over slavery heated up in the U.S. Congress in the 1830s, Southerners feared the distribution of literature from anti-slavery Northerners. The mere suggestion that slavery was not the normal condition of mankind elicited Southern fears. Northern congressmen increasingly argued that the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were committed to the ideals of equality.

In 1837, John C. Calhoun argued that slavery was a positive good that deserved to be preserved.

Books that taught freedom was an American birthright were burned. Southerners even imposed a gag rule whereby anti-slavery petitions from Northern communities — often grounded in the language of America’s founding documents — were immediately tabled in the House of Representatives. Antebellum Southerners were committed to the same thing as Laats: keeping the history of emancipation, freedom, and liberty activated by the Revolutionary generation away from potential learners.

Laats’s open admission that Northern states pursued the same course of action as the states of the former Confederacy reveals the fact that, across the entire county, most white Americans believed that relating the history of the American revolution with an emphasis on the intellectual and political ideas relating to human freedom should be a priority for young people.

Black Americans felt the same way.

Frederick Douglass revered what he called the great principles of the Declaration of Independence and the genius of American institutions. A commitment to ideas of the Revolution is what allowed black men and women to achieve freedom from slavery in the Civil War, and what would allow them to gain greater civil rights in the following century.

The politicization of history in recent years and its tendency toward partisan activism has led to the assumption that history curricula ought to emphasize the United States as particularly racist and immoral. Yet societies tell stories that emphasize their values. Since schools teach students what their respective societies see as valuable, secondary schools are and have always been the chief institutions for catechesis.

For most of its history, the United States has identified human liberty and the ideas of the Revolutionary generation as essential for maintaining a free republic. Yet this does not require or condone denying inequality or any immoral aspects of American history.

DeSantis seems to understand this principle. He has chosen to tell the story of human liberty; Laats wants him to tell the Confederacy’s story of racism and slavery.

Miles Smith IV is an assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College.