Lost Cause of the Confederacy: Difference between revisions

[[File:The Union as It Was.jpg|thumb|right|The image "The Union As It Was" was published in ''Harper's Weekly'' in 1874. On a pseudo-heraldic shield are a black family between a lynched body hanging from a tree and the remains of a burning schoolhouse, with the caption "Worse than Slavery". The supporters are a member of the White League and a hooded KKK member, shaking hands in agreement with the Lost Cause.]]{{blockquote | quote=They say that history is written by the victors, but the Civil War has been the rare exception. Perhaps the need for the country to stay together made it necessary for the North to sit silently and accept the South's conception of the conflict. In any case, for most of the past 150 years, the South's version of the war and [[Reconstruction era|Reconstruction]] has held sway in our schools, our literature and, since the dawn of feature films, our movies.|source=Mick LaSalle, ''[[The San Francisco Chronicle]]'', 2015<ref name="LaSalle2015">{{cite news | newspaper=[[San Francisco Chronicle]] | title=Romanticizing Confederate cause has no place onscreen | date=July 24, 2015 | first=Mick | last=LaSalle | url=https://www.sfchronicle.com/movies/article/Romanticizing-Confederate-cause-has-no-place-6403446.php | access-date=July 8, 2020 | archive-date=July 8, 2020 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200708114300/https://www.sfchronicle.com/movies/article/Romanticizing-Confederate-cause-has-no-place-6403446.php | url-status=live }}</ref>}}The movement that took ''The Lost Cause'' for its name had multiple origins, but its unifying contention was that slavery was not the [[Origins of the American Civil War|primary cause]], or even a cause at all, of the Civil War.<ref name="Janney2014">{{cite book |last1=Janney |first1=Caroline E. |editor1-last=Sheehan-Dean |editor1-first=Aaron |title=A Companion to the U.S. Civil War |year=2014 |publisher=John Wiley & Sons |isbn=978-1-118-80295-3 |page=1148 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-bfQAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT1148 |chapter=Memory}}</ref> This narrative denies or minimizes the explanatory statements and constitutions published by the seceding states—for example, the wartime writings and speeches of [[Confederate States of America|CSA]] Vice President [[Alexander H. Stephens|Alexander Stephens]] and especially his [[Cornerstone Speech]]. Lost Cause historians instead favor the more moderate postwar views of Confederate leaders.<ref>{{cite web|last1=Coates|first1=Ta-Nehisi|title=What This Cruel War Was Over The meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the words of those who bore it.|url=https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-this-cruel-war-was-over/396482/|website=The Atlantic|access-date=June 13, 2017|date=June 23, 2015|archive-date=May 13, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190513024042/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-this-cruel-war-was-over/396482/|url-status=live}}</ref> The Lost Cause argument stresses [[secession]] as a defense against a Northern threat to a Southern way of life and declares that this threat violated the [[states' rights]] guaranteed by the [[Constitution of the United States]]. The Lost Cause's assertion that any state had the right to secede was strongly denied in the North. Lost Cause arguments universally portray [[Slavery as a positive good in the United States|slavery as more benevolent than cruel]]. In its mythology and peculiarly Southern iconography, Confederate generals are characterized as morally flawless, deeply religious, and saintly or Christ-like.<ref>{{cite web |title=The Lost Cause |url=https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lost-cause-the/ |website=Encyclopedia Virginia |publisher=Virginia Humanities |access-date=February 1, 2024}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=Medlin |first1=Eric |title=The Lost Cause |url=https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/lost-cause |website=North Carolina Encyclopedia |publisher=North Carolina Government and Heritage Library |access-date=February 6, 2024}}</ref>

[[File:UDC-marker-fort-sanders-tn1.jpg|thumb|The [[United Daughters of the Confederacy]] helped promulgate the Lost Cause ideology through the construction of numerous memorials, such as this one in Tennessee.]]

Acting in their cultural and religious environments, white Southerners tried to defend what their defeat in 1865 made impossible for them to defend on a political level. The South's loss in what they viewed as a [[Religious war|holy war]], left these white Southerners facing inadequacy, failure, and guilt.<ref name="Edwards2000">{{cite book |last1=Edwards |first1=Laura F. |title=Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era |date=2000 |publisher=University of Illinois Press |isbn=978-0-252-07218-5 |page=181 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=aJu_wiSjvcYC&pg=PA181}}</ref> They faced them by forming what [[C. Vann Woodward]] called a uniquely Southern "tragic sense of life" expressed in their civil religion that combined Southern values with conservative and moralistic Christian values.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Wilson |first1=Charles Reagan |title=The Religion of the Lost Cause: Ritual and Organization of the Southern Civil Religion, 1865-1920 |journal=The Journal of Southern History|date=May 1980 |volume=46 |issue=2|pages=219–238 |doi=10.2307/2208359|jstor=2208359 }}</ref>

According to [[Henry Louis Gates, Jr.]], "the Lost Cause was fundamentally based on white supremacy". He posits that [[W. E. B. Du Bois]] understood, even beyond [[realpolitik|political realities]], that the falsified narrative of the Lost Cause was anti-blackBlack and would solidify a fabricated, romanticized narrative of American history. Gates says that Du Bois's ''[[Black Reconstruction in America|Black Reconstruction]]'' located the struggles and achievements of blackBlack Americans at the center of the story of the Reconstruction period. This was a challenge to Lost Cause adherents and to the prevailing academic view of Reconstruction at the time, that of the [[Dunning School]], which maintained that it was a failure, and which deprecated the contributions of black Americans. Gates describes ''Black Reconstruction'' as a "clarion call" for American blacksBlacks that demonstrated they would not tolerate a historical narrative imposed on them and on their own history by white supremacists.<ref name="Gates2019">{{cite book |last1=Gates Jr. |first1=Henry Louis |title=Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow |year=2019 |publisher=Penguin |isbn=978-0-525-55954-2 |pages=18, 254–255 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0LNiDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA254}}</ref>