The Confederate LOST CAUSE is not Lost

A hundred and seventy years after the American Civil War ended, we are hearing again about the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.   We see it in the display of Confederate Battle Flags, the “Stars and Bars,” at political rallies/marches, not to mention flag poles and bumpers stickers. It began to resurface following the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. BLM led to the removal of many Confederate statues, deemed racist reminders of slavery, from public squares throughout the South. The statues may be gone, but the Lost Cause survives.  What is it exactly?

The Lost Cause was a post-U.S. Civil War movement in the former Confederate states. It redefined the South’s reasons for Secession, as well as reconciling its untimely defeat.  The Lost Cause spoke of ‘chivalrous’ Confederate leaders and ‘noble’ soldiers in grey. They bravely defended state’s rights and the Southern way of life, against the cruel, industrial North. It compared them to the colonial patriots who fought against British tyranny during the American Revolution.

The Lost Cause claimed the plantation way of life and the inherent necessity for black slavery factored little into the Civil War.  [This is in direct odds with history. When the 11 Southern states seceded in 1861, they were all very clear about defending slavery.]

Each Confederate state’s Declaration of Secession, stated the need to preserve slavery. 

The Lost Cause said the Confederacy was forced to surrender to the Union, not due to any lack of will, skill or right, but simply because they were outnumbered. It stated they fought solely for state’s sovereignty, rights, and independence from the Yankee-controlled government.  They were fighting to hold back North aggression, and preserve their Southern agrarian economy.   The Lost Cause became a way to rewrite American Confederate history.

Although General Robert E. Lee accepted full responsibility for his defeat, Southern leaders refused to blame him. A new Lee Legend was created. He was a Christian soldier who fought to preserve the Confederate States of America, not slavery – even though he was a slave owner himself.  The Lost Cause even gave Lee a scapegoat: former General James Longstreet. Lee only lost the Battle of Gettysburg because Longstreet, his second in command, betrayed him.

Northern leaders argued the Confederate generals were all traitors to America. Robert E. Lee, a West Point graduate, betrayed his oath to “defend the Constitution of the United States.”  Southern leaders countered that by saying during the Revolution, the British considered Washington and Jefferson traitors as well.  So from this new, reimagined point of view, those seceding from the U.S. were the true patriots.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis proclaimed that the Confederacy had ‘perpetuated the principles of our Revolutionary forefathers.’  The Founders had left slavery intact in the Declaration of Independence. So he said it was Abraham Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation that had in fact betrayed the U.S. Constitution.

Lee, Davis and General Stonewall Jackson became knight-like heroes in the decades after the war.

Just look at the Stone Mountain, Georgia carving for one very large example of the Lost Cause.  The trio was contrasted with the ‘low moral standards’ of Union generals like Grant and Sheridan. Union generals had engaged in vicious campaigns against Southern cities, burning some of them to the ground.  Ulysses S Grant, now U.S. President, weighed in and flatly rejected the Lost Cause argument.

The idea was taken up in the 1890’s by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  With the slaves now freed – the Lost Cause defended a harsh and repressive political/economic system against negroes, known as Jim Crow.  Forty years after the war, statues of Confederate Generals (and former slave owners) began appearing in town squares across the South, sending a clear message to blacks.

The inherent evil of slavery was often brought up to Southern leaders. They pointed out that Washington and Jefferson were ‘benevolent slave owners’ and they were Founding Fathers. Slaves were taught a trade, housed, and well fed by their masters. However, in setting apart people as “good” slave masters, they conveniently left out the inherent evil of owning another human being.  

Following Reconstruction, came decades of cruel “Jim Crow.”

What exactly was that?   Jim Crow was a series of Southern state and local laws that basically legalized racial discrimination.  These laws marginalized the descendants of freed slaves by denying them jobs, banks loans, land ownership, equal education, and their right to vote. Those blacks who dared defy Jim Crow laws were terrorized, jailed without trial, and all too often lynched.

The Lost Cause evolved into a racial justification for the white supremacy that grew in the 1900’s. Southern leaders defended slavery as a ‘gentile institution’ that benefitted the slaves, who’d been well cared for by their ‘compassionate masters.’  They claimed that blacks were a lower race incapable of handling their own freedom, leading to black racist stereotypes that persisted over a century.

The Lost Cause narrative stopped being about the loss of the war, but rather a victory over Reconstruction.  They’d defeated the North’s efforts, and along with it – black rights.  Southern leaders made sure Southern textbooks portrayed the Confederacy’s goal as righteous and noble. It worked so well, the Lost Cause influenced U.S. education in many Southern school districts for a century.

By 1900, white northern leaders gave up trying to federally enforce blacks’ rights — ceding politics and law enforcement back to white, southern leaders and their Jim Crow laws.  Many white Americans wanted to forget about the Civil War — even if it meant leaving systemic racism behind, and the rights of African Americans forgotten.  ‘Separate but Equal’ segregation became the new mantra in the 1900’s. 

The Lost Cause was helped by Gone with the Wind, the famous 1939 film.

In the movie, Southerners were portrayed by famous Hollywood actors as noble heroes, in a civilized society, who tragically succumbed to the destructive Union army. The new Ku Klux Klan fraternity, restarted in 1915, advertised themselves as a part of the noble traditions of the South; rather than the racist, white supremacist hate group that it was.

Segregation could be found in schools, housing, churches, hospitals, hotels, sports, even the military.  Never separate but equal, it marginalized and discriminated against African Americans for decades.  Jim Crow laws existed for almost 100 years, all the way up to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement.  Only the Civil Rights Act of 1964 put them legally to an end.

So in the Lost Cause rewrite of history, leaders, wearing slavery blinders, could celebrate the ideals of the Confederacy as a part of Southern heritage.  160 years later, we again hear of those in power trying to rewrite history, to erase our racist past, and even change the historical facts taught to our children in today’s schools. But you see, it already has been rewritten, over a century earlier, in the Confederate Lost Cause.

For more by historical writer Paul Andrews, click BOOKS.