The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, also known as the Lost Cause Myth or simply as the Lost Cause, is an American pseudohistorical and historical negationist myth that argues the mission, purpose, or goals of the Confederate States during the American Civil War were morally just, heroic, and not centered on maintaining slavery. First articulated in 1866, it has continued to influence racism, gender roles, and religious attitudes in the Southern United States into the 21st century.
The Lost Cause reached the height of its popularity at the turn of the 20th century, when proponents memorialized Confederate veterans who were dying off. It reached another high-level of popularity again during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in reaction to growing public support for racial equality. Through actions such as building prominent Confederate monuments and writing history textbooks, Lost Cause organizations (including the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans) sought to ensure that Southern whites would know what they called the "true" narrative of the Civil War and would continue to support white supremacist policies such as Jim Crow laws. White supremacy is a central feature of the Lost Cause narrative.
Origin of the term
The term "Lost Cause" was sometimes applied by writers observing the Confederate war effort against the larger industrial might of the North. It appeared in the title of an 1866 book by the Virginian journalist Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. According to Pollard, the term was inserted at the request of his publisher in New York City, who feared that Pollard's original title, History of the War, would not be catchy enough to sell books. The "Lost Cause" title sold well. Pollard promoted many of the themes of the Lost Cause such as the claim that states' rights were the cause of the war and that Southerners were forced to defend themselves against Northern aggression. He dismissed the role of slavery in starting the war and understated the cruelty of American slavery, even promoting it as a way of improving the lives of Africans. Pollard's revisionist history continues to have an effect on how slavery and the Civil War are taught in the United States. For example, in 1866 Pollard wrote:
Pollard in The Lost Cause and its sequel The Lost Cause Regained drew inspiration from John Milton's Paradise Lost with the intention of portraying the pre-war South as a "paradise" that was lost in its defeat.
Tenets
Unimportance of slavery The movement that took The Lost Cause for its name had multiple origins, but its unifying contention was that slavery was not the primary cause of the Civil War and would have naturally perished. This narrative denies or minimizes the explanatory statements and constitutions published by the seceding states—for example, the wartime writings and speeches of CSA vice president Alexander Stephens and especially his Cornerstone Speech. Lost Cause historians instead favor the more moderate postwar views of Confederate leaders.
Confederate president Jefferson Davis wrote about the place of the South's enslaved African Americans in his The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881):
The Lost Cause narrative claims that it was merely a matter of time before the South would have given up slavery by its own choice and that it was the trouble-making abolitionists who manufactured disagreement between the regions. Enslaved African Americans were characterized as faithful and happy.
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 more benevolent than cruel.
States' rights 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 and its Tenth Amendment.
Southern states argued against states' rights when it benefited them in the context of fugitive slave laws. For example, Texas challenged some northern states having the right to protect fugitive slaves, with the argument that this would make the institution null once a particular slave had crossed into a free state. The question was pivotal in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.
Chivalric tradition
Lost Cause advocates point to a perceived chivalric tradition of the South as evidence for the Confederate States of America's cultural and martial superiority to the North, relying on nationalistic narratives of the fanciful Southern Cavalier descended from the English Royalists or the Norman knights of William the Conqueror.
Lost Cause rhetoric idealized the South as a land of "grace and gentility" where planter aristocrats were indulgent of their cheerful slaves and its manhood had great courage. Whites and blacks are portrayed as joined in support of the South's benevolent and gracious civilization, superior to that of the North. The Confederate soldier is romanticized as steadfast, dashing, and heroic. Lost Cause doctrine holds that secession is a right granted by the Constitution; therefore, those who defend it are not traitors. Southern military leaders are depicted in Lost Cause hagiography as virtual saints, with Robert E. Lee occupying the preeminent place as a Christ-like figure.
Undefeated South Lost Cause advocates try to rationalize the Confederate military defeat with the assertion that the South had not actually been defeated; rather, it had been unfairly overcome by the massive manpower and resources of the deceitful Yankees. Contradictorily, they also maintain that the South would have won the war if it had prevailed in the Battle of Gettysburg, and that it lost because of Stonewall Jackson's death in 1863 and the failure of Lieutenant General James Longstreet.
In explaining Confederate defeat, an assertion is made that the main factor was not qualitative inferiority in leadership or fighting ability but the massive quantitative superiority of the Yankee industrial machine. At the peak of troop strength in 1863, Union soldiers outnumbered Confederate soldiers by over two to one, and the Union had three times the bank deposits of the Confederacy.
In its mythology and peculiarly Southern iconography, Confederate generals are characterized as morally flawless, deeply religious, and saintly or Christ-like.
African American opposition to Lost Cause monuments
Stories of happy slaves and benevolent slave owners became propaganda to defend slavery and to explain Southern slavery to Northerners. The United Daughters of the Confederacy had a Faithful Slave Memorial Committee and erected the Heyward Shepherd monument in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.
After the Civil War, white Southerners wanted to portray the South positively by erecting Confederate monuments to memorialize Confederate generals in support of the false narrative that Confederates had fought the war to preserve states' rights and not slavery. African Americans such as 19th-century civil rights activist Frederick Douglass opposed the erection of Confederate memorials.
In 1870, Douglass wrote: "Monuments to the 'lost cause' will prove monuments of folly [...] in the memories of a wicked rebellion which they must necessarily perpetuate[...] It is a needless record of stupidity and wrong."
On May 30, 1871, during the national celebration of Memorial Day at the tomb of the unknown soldier in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, Douglass delivered a speech about slavery as the meaning and cause of the Civil War. He said: "We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember, with equal admiration, those who struck at the nation's life, and those who struck to save it—those who fought for slavery, and those who fought for liberty and justice. I am no minister of malice[...] I would not repel the repentant, but may[...] my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I forget the difference between the parties to that[...] bloody conflict."
John Mitchell Jr. was an African American newspaper editor, politician, banker, and civil rights activist in the 19th and early 20th centuries from Richmond, Virginia, who advocated against the erection of a Robert E. Lee monument there. He tried to block its funding, but a white conservative majority prevailed. On May 29, 1890, the statue was unveiled during a celebration and Mitchell covered the event in the Richmond Planet. He wrote: "This glorification of States Rights Doctrine—the right of secession, and the honoring of men who represented that cause [...] fosters in the Republic, the spirit of Rebellion and will ultimately result in the handing down to generations unborn a legacy of treason and blood."
W. E. B. Du Bois, a civil rights activist and Pan-Africanist, also spoke out against Lost Cause memorials. In 1931, in the official magazine for the NAACP, The Crisis, he criticized the disingenuous inscriptions on Civil War monuments, writing that the "plain truth of the matter would be an inscription something like this: 'sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery'".
On January 3, 1966, Sammy Younge Jr. was murdered in Tuskegee, Alabama, two years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which had made segregation of public places illegal. He stopped to use a public restroom at a gas station, and the white store owner, Marvin Segrest, told him to use the segregated restroom. He refused and told Segrest the Civil Rights Act made segregated facilities illegal. They argued, and Segrest shot Younge in the head. Segrest was not found guilty in court, which prompted Black students in Tuskegee, Alabama, to protest at the Tuskegee Confederate Monument. The monument was defaced, including with the phrase "Black Power". Protesters also unsuccessfully tried to pull it down with a rope and chain. The grounds are owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Twenty-first century removals On the night of August 20, 2018, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in North Carolina, hundreds of protesters gathered at "Silent Sam", a one-hundred-year-old Confederate Monument, and demanded its removal. By 9:30 p.m., they pulled down the statue with a rope. The gathering was supported by the actions of a previous student named Maya Little, when in April, Little protested the monument by pouring blood and paint on it. Some residents in North Carolina believe Confederate monuments have connections to white supremacy.
In 2020, during the George Floyd protests, several Confederate monuments were defaced with graffiti. From 2020 to 2021 in Virginia, many Confederate monuments were removed from Monument Avenue. The SPLC claim that in 2020 at least 160 Confederate symbols were moved from public spaces.
Lost Cause monuments continue to evoke conversations about racial injustice in the United States. They shift the memory of the Civil War away from themes of slavery and emancipation to states' rights with a romanticized version of slavery and the Civil War.
History Nineteenth century
The defeat of the Confederacy devastated many white Southerners economically, emotionally, and psychologically. Before the war, many believed that their rich military tradition would avail them in the forthcoming conflict. Many sought consolation in attributing their loss to factors beyond their control, such as physical size and overwhelming brute force.
The University of Virginia professor Gary W. Gallagher wrote:
Yale University history professor Rollin G. Osterweis summarizes the content that pervaded Lost Cause writings:
Louisiana State University history professor Gaines Foster wrote in 2013: