Lost Cause of the South

The term Lost Cause of the South (also Lost Cause of the Confederacy) refers to a number of interpretations of the American Civil War from an effectively pro-Southern perspective. All wars in history have had complex, nuanced reasons for their occurrence, but the idea of the "Lost Cause" is a classic example of denialism, where the conflict is reframed to minimize or even completely ignore the primary cause of the Civil War; the existence of slavery. This mythos makes reference to a number of different themes, and these appear in various pop culture sources and persist to this day.
==History==
Almost immediately after the war ended in 1865, the defeated Southern states had to form a coherent reason why they had engaged in a rebellion against the Union.
Such reason could not highlight the centrality of slavery to the Southern cause, but instead had to minimize, or even deny, the role of slavery. The first appearance of the term "Lost Cause" was in the 1866 book by Edward A. Pollard, deceptively titled The Lost Cause: A New Southern History Of The War Of The Confederates as there was no such book that preceded it.The Lost Cause: A New Southern History Of The War Of The Confederates: Comprising A Full And Authentic Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Late Southern Confederacy — the Campaigns, Battles, Incidents, And Adventures Of The Most Gigantic Struggle Of The World's History by Edward A. Pollard (1866) E. B. Treat & Company."Confederate Monuments" by Karen L. Cox. In: Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, edited by Kevin M. Kruse & Julian E. Zelizer (2022) Basic Books. ISBN 1541601394. Pages 155-168. Pollard laid the groundwork for the Lost Cause mythos: defending white supremacy, arguing that slavery was not a cause of the war, arguing for States' rights based on the Tenth Amendment, and that slavery was necessary to prevent race war. For Pollard, the Civil War only decided two things, the restoration of the Union and the end to slavery — not equality of the races, or voting rights for African Americans.
The literature promoting what was to become the Lost Cause mythos can be traced to the revisionist 1890 book Why the solid South?,Why the Solid South? or, Reconstruction and Its Results (1890) R. H. Woodward & Company. which argued that Black voters only wanted government money and that the Black Republican dominated governments during Reconstruction were corrupt.How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America by Heather Cox Richardson (2022) Oxford University Press. ISBN 019758179X. The ideas in the book were later promoted by Thomas Dixon in 1906 (Dixon later wrote the book that inspired the racist film The Birth of a Nation). Also beginning in 1896, steel baron James Ford Rhodes wrote a 7-volume revisionist history of Reconstruction, History of the United States from the compromise of 1850.History of the United States from the compromise of 1850. Volume 1850-1854 by James Ford Rhodes (1896) Harper & Brothers Publishers. Rhodes history came under contemporaneous and substantive criticism by historian but despite this, Rhodes' revisionist view of Reconstruction was taken up by William Archibald Dunning, a political theorist at Columbia University, as part of the of historiography.
Furthermore, many white Southerners during Reconstruction (1865-1877) believed that the Union had, in fact, placed an oppressive regime on their states. Union troops left the South at the end of Reconstruction, but the bulk of Confederate memorials were not built until after the beginning of the Jim Crow era in the 1890s.Confederate Monument Interpretation Guide (2020) Atlanta History Center. The memorials were often funded and driven by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and supported by many Southern veterans' groups.Investigation Finds Millions in Taxpayer Dollars Goes to Confederate Memorials (01.14.19) Equal Justice Initiative. The purpose of this was to try and redefine the meaning of the war to ignore slavery, so that the Southern "heroes" would not seem like evil racists seeking to hold down an entire race of people. A very good example of this is how Robert E. Lee is often played up as being opposed to slavery and only fighting for the Confederacy because his home state of Virginia joined the Confederacy, which ignores the fact he himself actually owned slaves and refused to ever release them, punishing them brutally when they tried to escape.
The myth as laid out by Jefferson Davis drew on contemporary trends in its portrayal of an idyllic rural South opposed to the industrial North. It was influenced by naive Romanticism, in particular the writings of the Scottish Tory novelist Walter Scott, several of whose stories referred to the defeat of the Jacobite pretenders in Britain; these books were popular in the South before and during the Civil War. In 1869, Davis travelled through Britain to Culloden, site of the Jacobites' ultimate defeat in 1746, to pay his respects and reflect on an earlier lost cause.While Statues Sleep, Thomas Laqueur, London Review of Books, Vol. 42 No. 12. 18 June 2020 Many Scots had emigrated to New World, particularly the Carolinas, and Davis praised the Scottish heritage of Stonewall Jackson and John C. Calhoun. An 1875 lecture published as Scotland and the Scottish People celebrated what he identified as the Scots and Irish love of tradition, and gave them as examples of glory in defeat, while recasting the war in Romantic terms as a defeat of rural tradition by brutal modern armies, and nothing to do with slavery.The Walter Scott Experience, Mike Goode, in Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism, edited by Jacques Khalip, Forest Pyle, Fordham University Press, 1 Jul 2016
==Themes==
The Lost Cause mythos has several themes associated with it. Here is a brief summary of some of them.
===About the war===
====Secession====
A common claim is that the principles of Constitutional originalism allowed for the legality of unilateral secession and that it was unconstitutional to use military force to keep the Union together. Thus, James Buchanan is often portrayed as adhering to the true meaning of the Constitution while Abraham Lincoln violated it by disallowing secession. The question of why the Framers didn't spell out this right when they wrote the Constitution is left unanswered.
Fair is fair and, at the time of the Civil War, if the Constitution allowed states to leave the union was much more up in the air. James Madison, the father of the Constitution,James Madison White House did not believe such a right existed, although he did acknowledge that it was legally permissible for a state to get permission from the federal government to leave the Union or for a revolution to occur.LETTER FROM MR. MADISON ON THE RIGHT OF SECESSION. The New York Times Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, did believe states had the right to leave the Union on the condition their rights were being violated.Thomas Jefferson: One Student's Perception Before and After Research New York Law School
Similarly, secession was not an idea exclusive to the Confederacy, with William Lloyd Garrison famously calling for the North to leave the Union and form its own nation free from slavery.No Union with Slaveholders Massachusetts Historical Society So it is not as if the notion that the South had the right to leave the Union had no basis in the understandings of the time.
However, then the issue becomes why the Confederacy wanted to be its own nation, and this is where those advocating for the Lost Cause really drop the ball. Remember, even granting them that a legal right to leave the nation exists, it was made clear by Jefferson it was only to be allowed on the condition that the federal government was infringing on the rights of the states, or the old argument about it being about States Rights, at which point it becomes incredibly important we understand what rights the states felt like they were being denied. If one switches this over to Madison's view, then that would be allowed on the condition the states that left the union got permission from the federal government, which they obviously failed to do. Even James Buchanan, infamous for barely doing anything to stop the states from leaving the nation, directly said he did not view what the South was doing as legal, even if he went on to say that the federal government lacked the power to stop them.James Buchanan’s troubled legacy as President Constitution Center
====The generals====
There is a strong focus on the Eastern Theater of the war, especially the battles that took place in Virginia, where Lee was able to hold down and defeat several Union generals. It ignores the Western Theater in Tennessee and points south, primarily because the Southern forces were routed there in the Battles of Shiloh and New Orleans in the spring of 1862. When the Western Theater is brought up, it is to focus on William T. Sherman's scorched-earth "March to the Sea".
Lost Causers also frequently invoke the pseudohistory of the United States as a Christian nation. Confederate generals and soldiers, particularly Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson are often described as pious, competent, gentlemanly figures, who often opposed slavery (despite owning slaves). Their motives were because their "home" was invaded. Lost Causers will often highlight the daring tactics of the Southern generals or the dashing nature of the cavalry units. Wartime atrocities committed by Union troops and generals are highlighted, but similar actions by "chivalrous" Southern troops (such as the Fort Pillow Massacre) and terrible conditions at various POW camps such as are ignored.
Robert E. Lee is claimed to have magnanimously "granted" an end to the war by surrendering in order to stop the bloodshed, rather than having his exhausted men, fleeing the fall of Richmond, being boxed in on all fronts. Lee, even among historians, is highly overrated as a general.The truth about Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee: He wasn’t very good at his job by Rosenwald, M. (October 31, 2017) The Washington Post. While Lee criticized the institution of slavery on a few occasions,Arlington, Bobby Lee, and the 'Peculiar Institution' by Ta-Nehisi Coates (August 13, 2010) The Atlantic. he also argued that slavery in America was better than being free in Africa, because it gave them discipline and Jesus; and that since God was fine with slavery, only God could abolish it. Furthermore, in the late 1850s when he inherited about 200 slaves from his father-in-law with the condition that he had to free them within five years, he not only kept them for the full five years, he actually went to court to try to have the time extended.The Myth of the Kindly General Lee: The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed. by Adam Serwer (June 4, 2017) The Atlantic.Along with the slaves, he inherited his father-in-law's plantation at Arlington (where the military cemetery of the same name now is), and intended to have all of the debts that came with it paid off before the five years was up. He reportedly treated the slaves brutally — which nearly caused a slave revolt. He also made a cruel habit of breaking up slave families, something which the Custis and Washington families (his wife was descended from both) traditionally refused to do. Additionally, during the Gettysburg Campaign, his troops kidnapped hundreds of free blacks in Pennsylvania and Maryland and sent them south for enslavement. On the other side of the coin is southern general James Longstreet, arguably the most competent corps commander of the war. Having become a "scalawag" (Confederate-turned-Republican) after the war, he is often demonized as a traitor to the South and especially to Lee, and somehow gets blamed for single-handedly losing the Battle of Gettysburg, despite Lee ignoring most of Longstreet's advice during the battle and having ordered the strategy (including ) that led to the loss.
In contrast, Union generals are often framed as being barbaric sinners, having sub-par tactical skills, and being able to win only because the Union had more men, resources, or (rarely) technology. William T. Sherman, for instance, was an advocate of a soon-to-be modern concept of a total war. showed a grain of truth to the violence and disrespect for private property; by burning the entire state to the ground, Sherman and his army did achieve its objective of crippling the South's ability to wage war, but was obviously a large source of resentment for a number of decades afterwards. In modern eyes the march to the sea does not look so horrible, but given that it was the first (and only) time total war and modern weaponry were combined on North American soil, it sticks out. Many wars in Europe, Africa, and Asia have seen both crueler tactics and more victims through them, and Sherman's March arguably did succeed in its goal of a quick, decisive end to the war on the Western theater.
Lost Causers will sometimes either claim that before the Civil War, people held more allegiance to the states that they lived in than to the United States. Another claim is that Lee hated slavery but had no choice but to join the Confederate Army because of his Virginia residency.The Southern generals who stuck with the Union in the Civil War by Gillian Brockell (April 9, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT) The Washington Post. As to the first claim, about 35-40% of Virginian military officers remained with the Union Army rather than join the Confederacy.The General in His Study by Elizabeth Brown Pryor (April 19, 2011 9:30 pm) The New York Times.William R. Terrill (1834–1862) by Stuart W. Sanders, Encyclopedia Virginia. As for the second claim, Lee opposed slavery in a rather abstract way stating at one point that they should be freed in the unspecified distant future.The Making of Robert E. Lee by Michael Fellman (2000) Random House. ISBN 0679456503. Lee himself owned slaves and treated them harshly.Let’s get real about Robert E. Lee and slavery by Gillian Brockell (September 10, 2021 at 8:24 a.m. EDT) The Washington Post.
Ulysses S. Grant was a common target of character assassination. He was depicted as an alcoholic and atheist. This even extended to his presidency. Yes, there was corruption (though Grant personally was innocent) and some of his ventures — like the annexation of what is now the Dominican Republic — failed spectacularly, but he was insanely successful in his Reconstruction policies and in crushing the Ku Klux Klan, aspects that were swept under the rug by a century of neo-Confederate historians. Some Confederate sympathizers may highlight Grant’s infamous General Order 11, which ordered all Jews out of Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee and contrast that to the fact that the Confederacy had a Jewish person, Judah P. Benjamin, hold several cabinet positions. While true, the order generated immediate controversy and was revoked nearly a month later.Anti-Semitism in the United States: General Grant’s Infamy Jewish Virtual Library. Additionally, it seems that Grant learned from this incident and he appears to have gone out of his way to appoint Jews to federal offices,Sarna, Jonathon D. (20120), When Grant Expelled the Jews became the first sitting US President to attend a synagogue service in 1876, and donated $10 to the synagogue’s building fund.Ulysses S. Grant's Washington Synagogue by Samuel D. Gruber (June 15, 2011) Forward.
====Emancipation Proclamation====
When it comes to the Emancipation Proclamation, issued by Lincoln as a war measure halfway into the war, it is emphasized that it "only" declared the freedom of slaves in those states still in rebellion, or about 78% of all American slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation did not affect the slaves in the "border states", the slave states which chose to stay in the Union (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia), or Confederate territory that was occupied by Union troops at the time. This point is meant to paint Lincoln as some kind of slavery-loving monster, which in turn supposedly makes the South look not as bad. This is ironic, as the South seceded due to fears that Lincoln would somehow dictatorially abolish Southern slavery, yet only from secession could this become a practical possibility. Lincoln (probably) didn't possess a wartime power to unilaterally abolish slavery in areas not at war with the USA, and in any case, enacting immediate emancipation in slave states within the Union would have risked alienating those states, possibly driving some into the arms of the Confederacy. As the war came closer to an end, he pushed for the Thirteenth Amendment (which did abolish American slavery altogether) against some counsel that it would be better to wait until the conflict was over.
A common corollary, advanced by both Lost Causers and left-wing critics of Lincoln, is that since Lincoln only abolished slavery in rebellious states, the Proclamation didn't actually free a single slave. This is actually incorrect: runaway slaves held in contraband camps were freed immediately, as were slaves in e.g. the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia, already held by the Union Navy, where the whites had fled to the mainland and left the blacks to run their own lives.The Civil War (TV miniseries) by Ken Burns. According to Eric Foner, as many as 50,000 slaves were freed immediately.Historian Eric Foner On The 'Unresolved Legacy Of Reconstruction' by Terry Gross (June 5, 20201:42 PM ET) NPR. The Proclamation turned the war into a revolutionary war, as slaves were freed wherever Union armies advanced into Southern states. Another criticism is that the Emancipation Proclamation only existed to prevent France and Britain from getting involved;Emancipation Proclamation was foreign policy while this may be true to some extent, if it was exclusively for realpolitik there would be no need to push for the end of slavery as part of the terms of surrender thus extending the war by a month or two, to say nothing of later amendments regarding voting rights.
Also, a significant number of slaves had been freed even before the Emancipation Proclamation, by the Confiscation Acts of and and the decisions by Congress to free the slaves in the US territories and the District of Columbia. Some border states abolished slavery by their own internal political processes even before the Thirteenth Amendment was passed: Missouri, Maryland and West Virginia.
That said, this point has been raised by non-Lost Causers (like ) who intend to diminish modern reverence for Lincoln without suggesting that his moral shortcomings are somehow balanced by an equal measure of Confederate nobility. However, like Bennett, they often resort to gross revisionism and oversimplification, and end up being little better than Lost Causers, despite having different intent.
====The War of Northern Aggression====
The first appearances of accusations of "Northern aggression" were in 1848 in the context of Northern states' refusal to allow additional slave states to join the United States."Northern Aggression" Google Books Ngram Viewer (archived from 30 Jun 2024 06:47:31 UTC).Speech of Hon. John A. Dix, of New York, on the bill to establish governments in the territories. Delivered in the Senate of the United States, July 26, 1848 Despite the between free states and slaveholding states that strengthened the and allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slaveholding state, Southern accusations of "Northern aggression" continued after the compromise, and were recognized for their duplicitous usage.The Wrongs of Kansas: Speech of Hon. S. A. Douglas, of Illinois, in the United States Senate, March 3, 1854, on Nebraska and Kansas Google Books. They continued after South Carolina Confederates began the war by attacking Fort Sumter in 1860 that initiated the Civil War, and for several years after the war itself.
The term "The War of Northern Aggression" however is not known to have appeared until 1955,"War of Northern Aggression" Google Books Ngram Viewer (archived from 30 Jun 2024 06:50:12 UTC). which was shortly after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, and was likely a counter-reaction to the growing civil rights movement. A 1955 issue of The Saturday Evening Post described the apparent first mention of the term, which was by the South Carolina state government accompanying their announcement of finally retiring the state's share of Civil War debt:Belated Mortar Burst From South Carolina (March 19, 1955) The Saturday Evening Post.
From this historical narrative, one can see the belief in Confederate victimhood had an early start in the Lost Cause narrative. Perceived victimhood is but one aspect of fascism, according to historian Robert Paxton:
 
Most of these other aspects can be found either in the Confederacy itself or in the Lost Cause ideology.Worshiping the Confederacy is about white supremacy — even the Nazis thought so: Confederate memory nurtured fascism. by Nina Silber (August 17, 2017 at 6:00 a.m. EDT) The Washington Post.
===African-Americans===
Lost Causers claim that slaves were content with their lot. Likewise, they claim that slavery was a "mild or benign institution" that was for the "betterment" of Africans (sound familiar?). Examples include claims that slave owners were paternalistic figures to their slaves, that they loved their slaves like children, and were in turn loved as parent figures. Black women will fall into a "mammy" stereotype to defend the white families that they somehow love more than their own. Hearing these descriptions, one almost wonders what the whips were for! They either ignore the slave revolts or the millions of slaves that fled to Union lines with whatever property they had in the hope of gaining their freedom, or consider them traitors, thieves, or conspirators (especially during Reconstruction). Moreso, they ignore the significant numbers of military-aged white males who had to be continually kept on the home front to guard against slave revolts and escape attempts, despite the Confederate army experiencing a severe manpower deficit as the war went on.
They overemphasize the (very few) free blacks who did indeed own slavesBlack Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 by Larry Koger (1995) University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 1570030375. or fought for the Confederacy, ignoring that the Confederate government emphatically refused to allow any slaves to fight until about two months before the end of the war. Even then only a small number were raised, most never saw combat, and a majority had soon deserted for the Union. Northern black troops, additionally, are also presented as being alien to the Southern slaves, and because of that they were not willing to join. This claim is made despite that the black troops were often the North's best recruitment tools for Southern slaves to join the army.
They repeatedly claim that the vast majority of whites did not own slaves:
Of course, to get these low percentages, you need to include all states, including those that literally outlawed slavery, and count only the head of each household as a slaveowner. A more reasonable method of counting shows that, in most slave states, over 25% of households owned slaves. In Mississippi and South Carolina, roughly half of households owned slaves.1860 United States census, tallied by The Civil War Home PageDid Only 1.4 Percent of White Americans Own Slaves in 1860? by Alex Kasprak (7 August 2019) Snopes.A Vice article gives us some 'smart facts' and 'dumb myths' on slavery, user BreaksFull (May 2015) Reddit, r/badhistory.Percentage of families owning slaves, 1860 Census Infogram.
This also ignores two things: most of them almost certainly hoped to be wealthy enough to own slaves someday, and all whites benefited whether they personally had slaves or not. As long as blacks were slaves, being white guaranteed you weren't on the bottom-most rung of society no matter how poor you were. That being said, slavery propagated the vast income inequality in the South, and rich white slaveowners could even opt out of the war with money (this had created complaints by soldiers being about a rich man's war and a poor man's fight), so to argue about a "Lost Cause" is really more of arguing for the aristocrats' Lost Causes.
On the other hand, Lost Causers deflect to the atrocities committed by Union forces against slaves and free blacks. They also deflect the cruelty of black units against white populations (also known as the Black brute stereotype).
Lost Causers argue that slavery was ended in the Southern states before it was ended in the Northern (border) states, as a sign that the war was not really about slavery or that the North enjoyed slavery more. Of course, slavery's ending in the South was not voluntary, and its existence in border states was much smaller in slaves per capita.
Lost Causers argue that today's African-Americans are fortunate to live in the United States rather than modern Africa. Putting aside the problems with generalizing Africa as entirely miserable, while also being irrelevant to history, ignores that in the hypothetical absence of any slave trade (or the accompanying European/American imperialism), today's Africa would be a very different place in ways that are hard to estimate. If alien invaders regularly kidnapped thousands of Americans over hundreds of years, the USA just might become a tad worse off. If the slavery industry had worked with such a goal in mind, being for the betterment of people in the future, then there's no reason anyone had to be taken forcibly from their families, and definitely no reason for actual enslavement. The (non-)slavers could simply have provided a free or commercial travel service, akin to the ships that went to Ellis Island. Yet Lost Causers who make this rather outrageous argument also tend to take a hard stance on modern illegal immigration (such as by supporting deportation of undocumented immigrants). If Africans enter the USA illegally, a consistent conservative would insist that they be sent away. Furthermore, no one who says this has ever proposed which modern-day endemically-poor country the USA should start kidnapping from for the sake of future generations.
They may attempt to blame slavery on Britain, as slavery in North America started when the future US was still part of the British Empire. However, this ignores that the British Parliament abolished slavery before the US, and did so peacefully. Not to mention that while it may have started with the British Empire, that hardly excuses continuing it after independence (which, incidentally, slaveowners had insisted on), thus making this argument also irrelevant.
===Reconstruction===
Reconstruction refers to the period of time in between 1865 and 1876 when the US Army was in effective control of the former Confederacy. While not a part of the war per se, it is nonetheless important. Significant myths include:
*That freed slaves were coerced by Union forces to vote in elections for puppet Republican governments.
*Conversely, that freed slaves collaborated with the Union forces to install harsh Republican governments and suppress and harass white people.
*That many freedmen and women were content to engage in sharecropping.
*That Jim Crow laws were needed in order to deal with a "small number of malcontents", or that most black people liked it.
*That Congress was overly harsh in its reconstruction policies (this is still disputed).
*That the Ku Klux Klan was not a terrorist organization, but was some type of veterans or civic group (and if you believe this I have a really nice bridge in Brooklyn that I'm looking to sell).
==Conclusions==
All of the above themes are present in the myth of the Lost Cause of the Civil War. Sadly, they have not fully gone away a full century and a half after the war ended, especially in popular culture. Notable examples include the movies Birth of a Nation (1915),D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: A History of "The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time" by Melvyn Stokes (2007) Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195336798. Sidney Howard's Gone With the Wind (1939) based on the 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell,Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936). Macmillan."Gone With the Wind (1939) and the Lost Cause: A Critical View" by Melvyn Stokes (2007) In: The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches, edited by James Chapman et al. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0230001696. and more recently the theatrical cut of Ronald F. Maxwell's Gods and Generals (2003)."Gods and Generals Movie Review" by Roger Ebert (February 21, 2003). These popular renditions of the Lost Cause mythos have helped to cement the idea among some northern Whites, but it actually began in the 1880s with Civil War veterans' reunions that hastened reconciliation between the two sides. There are some historians today who still persist in presenting these myths (though very few of them are mainstream academics). In their more extreme forms, these myths are still alive and well in neo-Confederate organizations and other hate groups.
==Right from the horse's ass… er, mouth==
Still believe that the Confederacy wasn't about slavery and racism? The founding documents of the Confederacy disagree with you.
===Alexander Stephens===
In his famous 1861 Cornerstone Speech, — the first vice-president of the Confederacy — disputes, at length, this so-called Lost Cause of the South:The "Cornerstone" Speech by Alexander Stephens (March 21, 1861) Owl Eyes.He apparently thought the idea that black people were inferior to white people and should be slaves was a radical new idea that was just a bit slow catching on.
===Articles of Secession===
Among the various Articles of Secession promulgated by the would-be members of the Confederacy were:Declaration of Causes of Seceding States (archived from February 14, 2015).
Georgia:
Mississippi:
South Carolina:
Texas:
===Confederate States of America Constitution===
Constituent assemblies in the other states of the Confederacy all underscored in their discussions the need to maintain a slave society and economy. Likewise, the right to hold slaves was specifically protected by the constitution of the Confederacy, denying its constituent states the right to outlaw slavery within its territories (so much for "states' rights").
===Demographics===
According to the 1860 US census, among the states that attempted to secede, 30.8% of families owned slaves.Selected Statistics on Slavery in the United States Causes of the Civil War. The vast majority of soldiers depended on slaves.Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era BlogSmall Truth Papering Over a Big Lie: A Texas State Senate Resolution claims that most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves. Why that's misleading. by Ta-Nehisi Coates (August 9, 2010) The Atlantic. According to the exhaustive study of the Army of Northern Virginia performed by historian Joseph Glatthaar, about 10% of the 1861 enlistees personally owned slaves (along with more than half of the officers), and very nearly half either owned slaves or lived in a slave-owning household.General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse by Joseph Glatthaar (2009) Free Press. ISBN 1416596976. And non-slaveholders had plenty of reason to fight to maintain these lucrative slave relationships: they had friends and neighbors who owned slaves; who ran businesses which rented slaves; they made their money by doing business with slaveowners; they aspired to own slaves; slaves kept the rich rich and the poor poor; or they simply believed that slavery was morally right and liked having someone to feel superior to. So sure, less than one person in three owned slaves, but when you consider the Glatthaar study and other factors e.g. the manpower required to enforce slavery on a domestic and national level e.g. Overseers, domestic help on plantations etc, then it's likely that more than half the Confederacy's free population benefited from, or depended upon slavery.Why Non-Slaveholding Southerners Fought by Gordon Rhea (January 25, 2011) Civil War Trust.
===Crittenden Compromise===
As a final nail in the coffin, there's the proposed of 1861. Four states had already seceded, but Senator John J. Crittenden hoped that war could be prevented and union restored with a massive "compromise" that was largely a concession to the South. The compromise consisted of a set of proposed Constitutional amendments that dealt entirely with slavery. In other words, Crittenden had some reason to believe that war could be prevented solely by promising the preservation of Southern slavery, and if it weren't for Republican opposition (the amendments lost in the Senate by 25 Republican votes to 23 others), the compromise could very well have succeeded. It never occurred to anyone to prevent war by offering the South a non-slavery-related compromise.
Now do you think the South wasn't racist, or that slavery was just a minor issue in the declarations that led to the treasonous War to Preserve Slavery?
==The mis-education of the Virginia student==
Carter G. Woodson, in his 1933 book The Mis-Education of the Negro, made reference to propagandistic school textbooks written by white people that claimed that white people were superior to black people. Woodson laid out how education discouraged critical thinking. This was the main problem with Lost Cause textbooks: they were propaganda designed to discourage critical thinking by obscuring the truth. Prior to Woodson, Frederick Douglass criticized the Lost Cause mythos as early as 1870, and African American publications continued to criticize it into the 21th century.
The teaching of the Lost Cause in school textbooks can be traced back as far as 1885 with claims that states' rights were the primary cause of the Civil war,A Brief History of the United States by Joel Dorman Steele (1885) American Book Company. and continuing to Susan Pendleton Lee's textbooks of the 1890s that claimed that the North started the Civil WarLee's primary school history of the United States by Susan Pendleton Lee (1897) B. F. Johnson Publishing Co. and that the Civil War was not about slavery.New School History of the United States by Susan Pendleton Lee (1899) B. F. Johnson Publishing Co.Lost Cause Textbooks: Civil War Education in the South from the 1890s to the 1920s by Earl King (2018) University of MississippiU. Honors Thesis. In 1878, a speech at a Confederate monument dedication specifically mentioned that children should be indoctrinated in the Lost Cause mythos. This was a time when Southern whites began to reject the narrative of the war provided by Northern publishers.
In 1950, the Virginia state legislature created the Virginia History and Government Textbook Commission to oversee the creation of public school textbooks in the state.Happy slaves? The peculiar story of three Virginia school textbooks by Rex Springston (Apr 14, 2018) Richmond Times-Dispatch. The commission was founded as a direct reaction to President Harry S. Truman's civil rights agenda. The commission was controlled by the (or Byrd Organization), a political machine that was led by Senator Harry F. Byrd, a segregationist.A Study of the Virginia History and Government Textbook Controversy, 1948-1972 by Fred R. Eichelman (1975) Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Doctoral thesis. The commission hand-picked authors of the textbooks, some who were qualified historians but others who were only schoolteachers. However, the commission held the ultimate control of the content and demanded repeated revisions to reflect the 'Virginia spirit', an apparent euphemism for the Lost Cause ideology. The commission focused on three textbooks, one each for 4th, 7th, and 11th grades. Each textbook was published in two editions, one in the 1950s and one in the 1960s. The commission disbanded in 1957, four months before the textbooks were first delivered to schools, but the textbooks were in use as late as the 1970s.
For the 11th grade textbook, Cavalier Commonwealth,Cavalier Commonwealth: History and Government of Virginia by William Edwin Hemphill (1963) McGraw-Hill.Then and now: new perspective on old textbook passages by Rex Springston (Apr 15, 2018) Richmond Times-Dispatch. scholar Fred R. Eichelman commented, "A reader of the textbook would not be aware that any controversy existed over integration if this were his only source of information."
Early critics of the 4th grade textbook, Virginia's History, accused it of peddling myths, but one of the 7th grade textbook's coauthors, Spotswood Hunnicutt Jones, defended the book, saying, "To explode the Pocahontas legend would be much like saying there is no Santa Claus."
===Virginia: History, Government, Geography===
The 7th grade textbook, Virginia: History, Government, Geography, has been described as "Historically wrong and morally bankrupt — but for tender White minds, discomfort-free."
The textbook is written in a vague and generalizing style that might have been common for that time and age group. It lacks both bibliography and suggestions for classroom discussion.
The book engages in a casual racism: though claiming that Africans from the Gold Coast (part of modern-day Ghana) were "strong and intelligent", the book uses the term 'people' to refer to white people or perhaps more specifically to slave owners: "Many people feared that the slaves might rebel against their masters." Later in the text, the authors claim that before the Civil War "the feeling between the white people and the Negroes was quite friendly." The text then goes on to engage in a more overt type of racism by stereotyping recently freed enslaved people as lazy for refusing to work for their former-enslavers. Popular and Pervasive Stereotypes of African Americans (Oct 23, 2018) National Museum of African American History & Culture..
The book claims that because corporal punishment of children was commonly accepted at the time, the whipping of slaves was justified:
The book makes the preposterous claim that enslaved Africans were better off in Virginia than in Africa:
The book puts forth the idea that states' rights were central to southern later secession.
The book claims that though laws for controlling slaves were strict, they were often not enforced, and implies an inherent libertarian belief among slave owners:
In second page on the description of life as a slave, the authors give an exceptional case as an example, not a typical case. The case was that of Reverend Thaddeus Herndon (misidentified in the book as Thomas Herndon)Virginia Baptist Ministers by George Braxton Taylor (1912) J. P. Bell Company. Third Series. freeing a slave family and sending them to Liberia. Besides getting Herndon's name wrong, the textbook authors needlessly partly-fabricated a quote that was attributed to Herndon. The population of slaves in the United States varied between 2.3 million to 4.4 million from 1830 to 1860,Black and slave population of the United States from 1790 to 1880 Statista. but the total number of emancipated slaves who returned to Liberia before the Civil War was only 15,000 (less than 1%, an obvious case of cherry picking).Extreme Mortality in Nineteenth-Century Africa: the Case of Liberian Immigrants by Antonio McDaniel (1992) Demography 29(4):581-594.
Abolitionists are portrayed very negatively, and it is implied that slave owners would agree to abolition if only they were compensated for the loss of their property, the enslaved people; no mention is given for remuneration of the enslaved people.
In response to Virginians had a debate about the abolition of slavery and a vote in the state legislature. The abolition of slavery did not pass in the legislature, and the legislature instead voted for even harsher laws against slaves.The birthplace of American slavery debated abolishing it after Nat Turner’s bloody revolt by Gregory S. Schneider (June 1, 2019) The Washington Post. This was the likely outcome because Virginia still required one to be a white male property ownership to vote in elections at that time,Property Requirements for Voting in Virginia, 1670-1850 Virginia Places. so the legislature was dominated by slave owners and those elected by slave owners. The textbook depicts Virginia's most vocal slavery-defender Thomas Roderick Dew as having the 'correct' argument:
The Union Army is described as "the enemy", and as an invading army. This is despite the Confederacy having started the war by attacking Fort Sumter in South Carolina, and Fort Monroe in Virginia having been occupied by the Union Army continuously from 1834-2011. Fort Monroe, Hampton GovernmentFort Monroe becomes National monument, Obama White House Archives, October 20, 2011 It was also the case that many white families were divided about secession and fought on opposite sides in the war;The Divided Family in Civil War America by Amy Murrell Taylor (2009) The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807861863. this was true particularly in border states, including Virginia (the state still known today as West Virginia was literally "formed because of the Civil War",Preston Williams, West Virginia: The state that said no. The Washington Post, 30 March 2011. since the population of the region refused to take part in secession).
==Afterword==
Consider the future of a nation whose founding principle was the right to secede from the larger body over any heated political disagreement in which regional interests were also involved. Consider how fortunate all of us are — especially those who would have had to live there — never to have had such a nation in North America.
==See also==
==External links==
*PBS interviews historians debunking myths about Reconstruction
*Civil War causes, archive of primary documents
*Declaration of Causes of Seceding States (archived from November 17, 2012)
*L. Neil Smith's Ahistorical Comparison Of Lincoln To Lenin by Brian Tubbs (12 June, 2000)
*Hollywood's Reconstruction and the Persistence of Historical Mythmaking by Ron Briley, The History Teacher (archived from October 21, 2011)
*Confronting Slavery and Revealing the "Lost Cause" by James Oliver Horton, National Park Service
*Lost Cause Religion by David S. Williams (5/16/2005) The New Georgia Encyclopedia (archived from August 20, 2006)
*Lost Cause category Civil War Memory
*Neo-Confederate hooey (8 Jul 2015) Rantings of a Civil War Historian
*Southern Slavery As It Wasn't: Coming to Grips with Neo-Confederate Historical Misinformation. by William L. Ramsey & Sean M. Quinlan (2005) Oklahoma City University Law Review 30(1)
*Confederacy: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (Oct 8, 2017) YouTube
*Richmond sculptor Edward Valentine created many of the statues that defined Lost Cause mythology. Now his family’s museum is confronting the legacy. by Gregory S. Schneider (Jan. 2, 2021 at 3:00 a.m. PST) The Washington Post
*Famous in its day: Aunt Fanny’s Cabin — a restaurant that perpetuated the Lost Cause from the 1940s until 1994
*Checkmate, Lincolnites! — a YouTube series by Atun-shei Films debunking many of the PRATTs used by Lost Causers
==Further reading==
*The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader, eds. James W. Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta
*Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz
*The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, eds. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Denialism
Category:Fascism
Category:Pseudohistory
Category:Nationalist pseudohistory
Category:Racism
Category:Slavery
Category:Slavery apologists
Category:Theocracy