Have We Heard Enough About the Lost Cause?
On his Substack Civil War Memory a couple days ago, my friend Kevin Levin asked “Have We Heard Enough About the Lost Cause?” His post was sparked by an interesting comment from one of his readers who’d suggested that Kevin “was writing too much about the Lost Cause.”
Kevin offered an interesting rumination in response, admitting that the reader might be right. But he also said, correctly, “The Lost Cause has influenced popular culture and our politics in ways that other narratives of the war simply have not. . . .”
As I said in my reply to Kevin’s post, I think we end up talking about the Lost Cause as much as we do because it did such terrible damage to the popular understanding of Civil War history. As historians, we are constantly challenged to keep the record straight by people who don’t really want the record, favoring instead a long-debunked narrative that they find more comforting (less threatening?). Those people just don’t want to let the Lost Cause go, and thus it get perpetuated.
The Lost Cause is like A. P. Hill’s “social disease”—controllable but not curable, apt to flair up over and over.
And so, time and time again, historians have to rise up, over and over, with facts and primary sources and all the other tools of the credible trade and explain—again—why the Lost Cause is hokum.
I admit, I am fascinated by the Lost Cause as a phenomenon. As I’ve written in the past, I even have a kind of grudging respect for its architects for the effectiveness of their brainwashing. The Lost Cause became a mass delusion that evolved into dogma, and as such, anyone who questions it is a heretic. (I’m sure I’ll get hate mail in the comments, below.)
Kevin, who has his finger on the pulse of this better than I do, believes blind acceptance of the Lost Cause “has changed significantly over the past two decades.” I sure hope so. In posing as history, the Lost Cause distorts the study of actual history. Moving past the Lost Cause would let us study and learn from history a lot more effectively because the Lost Cause mythologizes people like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and others. Adoration gets in the way of our ability to look at them and think about them critically.
When they—or anyone from history—is treated like a God, we lose touch with their humanity, making it impossible for us to fully understand and appreciate their legitimate pros and cons. That, in turn, makes it hard to really learn anything from them.
Fortunately, doctors eventually discovered a treatment for Hill’s “social disease” (although too many years later to do Hill any good). Similarly, I hope historians will one day finally be able to cure us of the Lost Cause.
Censorship is rarely justified; and as regards discussions of ALL aspects of the Civil War and its aftermath… it is NEVER justified.
Cheers
Mike Maxwell
I don’t think anyone is suggesting censorship. As a guy who teaches in a journalism school and someone who believes in the “marketplace of ideas,”
I’m definitely an advocate of letting people hash things out. And I believe in studying the Lost Cause as a phenomenon.
That said, I hope the Lost Cause dies out in the same way that the belief in a flat earth died out. There was resistance to that for a long time, but eventually, facts and reason won out. I hope the same will hold true for the Lost Cause: outdated thinking will eventually die out.
This is a topic I’ve given a lot of thought lately, and at the risk of saying something unpopular, I strongly feel that the term has become overused. As a topic, it certainly has a place in Civil War scholarship, but some have stretched its definition to the breaking point. Is it possible for a piece of media to show things from the Southern (Confederate) perspective without being accused of being “Lost Cause Propaganda”? The Confederacy being outnumbered and out-resourced was a tenet of the Lost Cause but it also happens to be true. I think we should be very careful about the terms we use and apply them strategically, not as a catch-all for any perspective we disagree with.
I agree. Too often, people treat the entire Civil War as radioactive because of its association with the Confederacy and/or the Lost Cause. The study of the war is necessary—even crucial. Not all things South or Confederate were Lost Cause.
To speak to your example about resources, the difference to me comes when the resource issue becomes and excuse rather than a reason. It was objectively true; how that fact is interpreted makes all the difference.
That’s true, context is always crucial
No, the core historical tenets of the Lost Cause ideology are fundamentally false or heavily distorted.
1. Secession was about states’ rights, not slavery: False. While states’ rights were constantly invoked, the specific right the South wanted to protect was the ownership of enslaved people. Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, and Texas explicitly cited the preservation of slavery as their primary reason for seceding in their official secession ordinances.
2. The North won solely due to overwhelming men and resources: Partially based on fact, but misleading. It is true that the Union possessed a massive advantage in population, manufacturing capacity, and railroad mileage. However, this tenet is used to erase Confederate strategic and tactical errors, poor logistics, and the internal political fractures of the Confederacy. Defeat was not only math; it was also a consequence of the Confederacy’s failing economic model and military choices.
3. Enslaved people were “faithful” and happy/benefited by slavery: False. This was a paternalistic fabrication designed to justify human bondage. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved African Americans fled to Union lines the moment they had the opportunity, actively undermining the Confederate war effort and joining the U.S. Colored Troops.
4. Confederate leaders and soldiers were heroic/saintly: Subjective/Mythologized. Figures like Robert E. Lee were turned into religious-like icons, while the brutal reality of a rebellion fought to preserve human chattel slavery was sanitized.
The “Lost Cause” is nothing more than a historical myth created by Southern white writers, politicians, and historians after the American Civil War to rewrite the history of the Confederacy. Mainstream historians today universally recognize it as a fake, inaccurate narrative designed to justify the war and uphold white supremacy.
But you and most other historians spend so much time condemning the Confederacy, you fail to write about another myth. The north’s Rigtheous Cause Myth. You know the truth about Lincoln, but you still glorify him and his generals. You know his own cabinet encouraged him to just let the south go. You know his response was “Who will pay for the government?” So, yes. I think there is too much about the “Lost Cause” and nothing about the “Righteous Cause Myth. I respect you and appreciate your work. I am now writing my third book about the history of the Civil War in my South Carolina Lowcountry. I seek to write all of the truth, good and bad, for the north and south.