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.
The reason we haven’t heard enough about the Lost Cause is that the narrative still (again) dominates our understanding of history. The Trump administration has a broad initiative to enshrine the Lost Cause as our official version of history. The Smithsonian and state curricula are under continuous attack.
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
Spot on.
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.
Well articulated.
While the image of the “happy slave” is, of course, ridiculous, it remains a fact that the majority of enslaved people did not run off at the first opportunity. Historians estimate at least 474,000 African Americans spent time living and working in Contraband Camps, that’s 12% of the prewar slave population of 3,953,760. Roughly 179,000 to 186,000 black men enlisted as soldiers in the Union Army alongside 19,000 to 20,000 black sailors. Some of them were free to begin with. That number is nothing to sneeze at, but from the perspective of white Southerners, a large majority did remain “loyal”. Of course they interpreted that as loyalty, and maybe some were, but it’s also a sad fact of human psychology that most prefer the safety of the known to the unknown, even under terrible conditions. Even when facing certain death, prisoners in the gulag didn’t run off en mass for that exact reason.
The NPS and Historians estimate that approximately 100,000 enslaved people escaped via the Underground Railroad, though some research suggests the total could be as high as 500,000 by the end of the American Civil War
Let us all recall that while the Republican Party opposed the extension of slavery, the Dred Scott decision invalidated the Missouri Compromise declaring that Congress lacked the Constitutional power to prohibit slavery in Federal territories.
And despite a Supreme Court decision validating the South’s position, they still left the Union.
This is in reply to NYGiant1952’s comment about the Dred Scott decision—That’s true and many Southern unionists argued that slavery was best protected by remaining in the Union, that secession would only lead to the destruction of the institution it sought to protect, and they were proven right. Although I think slavery was destined for the dust bin of history anyway.
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.
I don’t spend a whole lot of time glorifying Lincoln’s generals, and I don’t spend much time condemning the Confederacy, either. I certainly don’t think the Confederacy was a good idea, and I certainly do get annoyed by people who contend the war wasn’t about slavery and that the Confederacy wasn’t based on slavery and that “my ggg-grandaddy” (or whomever) didn’t own slaves and so it wasn’t about slavery.
I don’t know that the “Righteous Cause” was a myth. There’s a lot of documentation about soldiers enlisting because they thought preserving the Union was worth going to war for. That certainly shifted over time. I’ve not seen any credible sourcing on the Lincoln/cabinet story you mention.
I applaud any efforts to try and tell a full and balanced “good and bad, for north and south” perspective.
Regarding your comment….” You know his own cabinet encouraged him to just let the south go. You know his response was “Who will pay for the government?”……….
No, that specific exchange is an apocryphal (unverified or false) quote that surfaced long after the Civil War, not an official record from Lincoln’s cabinet meetings. Your comment was popularized decades later by retrospective commentators and editorial writers attempting to frame the conflict primarily around federal taxation and tariff revenues rather than secession and slavery. Just more “Lost Cause ” rhetoric that is false.
The fact is the Confederacy started the war by firing on Fort Sumter, and the Union and Lincoln went to War to preserve the Union.
Cotton is king was a myth along with the forlorn hope of foreign intervention.
You know that Lincoln did not go war to stop slavery.That is part of the Righteous Cause Myth. You know there is ample documentation that he himself said this on more than one occasion. You also should know that Federal soldiers did not join the army to end slavery. They joined to preserve the Union, You should also know that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the Confederate states. If he wanted to end slavery, why did he not apply it to the slaves in the north? You know why. It was a political decision. 15 of my ancestors fought for the Confederacy They were not fighting to keep slavery. They were all poor dirt farmers who could not afford to buy black human beings. The officers and plantation owners were fighting to maintain their slaves. I am one South Carolina 79 -year-old white boy who honors all men and women, north and south, who fought in this tragic war. I am the author of three Civil War books and Jim Harvey’s Civil War History with over 18,000 followers. I post about the Union and Confederate armies every day and make my position clear. Not all of us here in Dixie are ignorant of the true history.
Was Lincoln’s Cabinet meeting when he asked the members if they were supportive of going to war also a false narrative? The only member saying yes was the Postmaster General. The others, many of whom were war veterans, said no. Could it be that unpopular positions were not recorded?
A couple of things,
1. Jim, recall that two weeks after the vote you talk about, after receiving word that military advisors wanted to abandon even more federal forts, the cabinet’s mood shifted. Believing that complete surrender would mean the death of the Union, the cabinet flipped and voted 4-to-2 in favor of a relief expedition. That was recorded!
2. It is not a myth that soldiers went to War to preserve the Union. That has been documented repeatedly in theltters they left us.
3. Recall that slavery is inferred in the US Constitution (Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons). Three fifths of all other persons refers to slaves,as the US Constitution was interpreted. Therefore, an amendment to the Constitution has to be passed in order to abolish slavery.
4. Poor white southerners fought to preserve slavery because the system gave them a higher social standing over Black people and protected a shared white racial hierarchy, also known as white supremacy.
Let’s talk about facts.
I think your first sentence is worded incorrectly. Lincoln did not go to war, the Confederacy started the conflict by firing on Fort Sumter, a federal installation. Lincoln simply attempted to maintain the Union by calling for troops to put down the rebellion.
However, in one real sense, Lincoln also allowed the war to happen to prevent slavery’s expansion. He was elected as the Republican Party’s 1860 nominee. The Republican Party’s primary plank was no further expansion of slavery into the western territories. On this Lincoln and the Republican Party would not compromise. White southerners of all classes perceived the non-extention of slavery as the region’s virtual death knell. If slavery could not expand, then, by their reasoning, how could they keep a national balance of power to maintain slavery where it currently existed? They wondered if an amendment waited in the future to outlaw slavery. Therefore, and as they plainly state in their various declarations of secession, they attempted to leave the Union starting with South Carolina on December 20, 1860, a just over a month after Lincoln’s election.
While Lincoln stated in his first inaugural address that he did not wish to disturb slavery where it already existed, that was not good enough for the seceeded states. They wanted independence to maintain their current, and hopefully future, economy, society, and culture.
“You should also know that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the Confederate states. If he wanted to end slavery, why did he not apply it to the slaves in the north?” You very well know the answer to this. Lincoln made no secret from the 1850s on that he wanted to end slavery. But he also knew, under the Constitution, that he couldn’t.
One thing the Lost Causers and Confederacy rationalizers refuse to admit. Whether it was a fire eater like Wigfall or Yancey, or a relative moderate like Davis,or a Unionist like Stephens or Vance, there was no Southern politician from 1848 until 1861,who said secession was about anything but the preservation slavery. I’m not talking about the 1870s, when Davis and the bunch invented the nonsense about “intrusive government” and “economic conflict.”
The slaveowners were fine with intrusive government –when it meant kidnapping blacks in the South or terrorizing free boilers in Kansas. Not one of them mentioned anything but slavery from the debates over the 1850 compromise until 1865. Things didn’t get confusing until after the war.
Chris-this isn’t hate mail; just a few observations. I studied Virginia history in fourth grade in 1969-70 and was in the last class or next to last class that had a “Lost Cause” textbook. To state the obvious, there have been immense changes in this country since then and most Americans were not even alive in those years. You talk about Lost Cause “dogma” popping back up like a social disease. From where? Late night TV? No, they are leftists. The news media? No, they are predominantly leftists. College professors? Leftists. Public school administrators and teacher unions? Leftists. Hollywood? Leftists. None of them are Lost Cause enthusiasts. For good or bad, the left won the culture war. A majority or at least a substantial number of American students today think that white Americans invented slavery. They do not think that tariffs started the Civil War or that Longstreet should have attacked at dawn on July 2nd at Gettysburg or any other Lost Cause nonsense. Saying that the Lost Cause dogma should be eradicated like a social disease is just setting up a strawman equivalent to saying that hippies shouldn’t be discriminated against for having long hair and saying “groovy.”
It is an unfortunate fact of life that almost all areas of American life have been politicized. If you don’t believe me, just turn on late night TV and watch Trump supporters (or to borrow from Mr. Levin’s lexicon, “sycophants”) being laughed at and dehumanized. Kind of like how the Stonewall Jackson statue from Charlottesville was turned into a grotesque exercise in ritualized humiliation. Back in fourth grade, I liked to read about the Civil War, except for the Seven Days battles because they were such a disaster for the Union. I’m 56 years older now, and I still like to read about the Civil War. However, I’ve learned that the Confederates were people too, as are their descendants. Rather than dismissing half of the country as “sycophants” or degrading a work of art or talking about eliminating a line of historical interpretation, however wrong, as a social disease, we should cut our ancestors some slack. And cut ourselves some slack while we are at it.
Amen!
I don’t think Lost Cause-ism is nearly as prevalent as it used to be, although I do see plenty of it when I’m out giving talks and tours. There are always a few folks in the audience, or readers on the blog, who still espouse a Lost Cause perspective and stubbornly, even willfully, refuse to acknowledge modern scholarship. I liken it to a “social disease,” perhaps more literally then euphemistically, because the Lost Cause has poisoned our national ability to have any kind of rational discussion about race.
The fact that “Confederates were people too” is central to my argument that we shouldn’t mythologize Confederate leadership because it ignores their humanity.
I agree with the idea of cutting our ancestors some slack. We are not to blame (or to credit) for what they did. So there’s no need to feel guilty about it–or get defensive about it. That’s another symptom of Lost Cause-ism: people who espouse it often get defensive about their ancestors.
FYI, I’m a college professor and hardly a “leftist.” I DO believe in critical thinking, reason, and facts, though–which often gets a person labeled as a lefty these days.
I think you give the Lost Cause too much credit. Race in this country is discussed quite a bit and none of the people doing the discussing are quoting Jubal Early. Again, a substantial number of American students today think that white Americans invented slavery. I don’t think they got that idea from former Confederates complaining about Longstreet or misrepresenting the primary cause of the Civil War. If we fail to have a rational discussion about race or anything else, that’s on us, not on people who are long dead.
With respect to the political leanings of college professors, survey after survey show that they self identify overwhelmingly as liberal, progressive, leftist, or any other term you want to use, and contribute overwhelmingly to Democratic candidates. That’s neither good nor bad, just reality. Your statement that “I DO believe in critical thinking, reason, and facts, though-which often gets a person labeled as a lefty these days.” speaks for itself. Putting a word in all caps shows certitude about who believes in critical thinking, reason, and facts and who does not.
I agree, the majority of professors DO self identify as liberal, but that comes in a variety of shadings and it doesn’t mean EVERY professor.
Alas, as someone whose job is, among other things, to teach critical thinking, I know all too well that there are too many people do NOT believe in critical thinking, reason, and facts, which has been well documented (and thus my certitude). At the risk of veering too far into modern political matters, I’ll leave it at that.
You see it on tours because of the demographic on most battlefield tours. As we all know, they tend to skew older. I graduated high school in 1982 and I am one of the youngest people in my roundtable. The “ false history “ infecting education over the last two decades or more is not Lost Cause mythology. It’s the racialist, oppressed/ oppressor narrative of Critical Race Theory. And that narrative condemns most major historical figures of Western Civilization including Lincoln and Grant. Recall that the 2020 rioters defaced/ destroyed statues of Lincoln and Grant too. How much Lost Cause mythology did you hear from your students when you co-taught that Civil War course recently? That’s a legitimate question by the way, not a rhetorical one.
To Glen: I agree, the demographic that clings hardest to the Lost Cause is “aging out,” and although there are younger people who do follow in those footsteps–because so much of the Lost Cause is passed along, intergenerationally, as an oral history–what alarms me most is that it’s being replaced by a kind of historical amnesia or ignorance. Historical illiteracy. To some degree, that’s something people have complained about for decades (“they don’t teach history any more the way they used to!”–although there are some great studies contradicting that notion). But when you asked about my experience teaching the CW, most of the students were gen ed students, and they didn’t come in knowing a whole lot, let alone coming in with a particular interpretive frame. Most of my students come from the north and so probably wouldn’t get the same sort of frame of reference for the war that people in the south used to. (And for the record, I don’t know anyone who teaches CRT. I’m not saying it’s not out there, but in my experience, it’s not out there nearly to the extent that some people think it is. I think the destruction of Lincoln and Grant statues was as much out of angry ignorance as anything, although indeed, there were other factors at play at other levels in those protests-turned-mobs.)
If there are any students reading this, please know that white people did not invent slavery. And be aware, slavery continues to this day, worldwide. Forced labor and human trafficking.
On a personal note, I am lucky enough to know where all my cousins are, I do not have a lost cuz.
On another personal note, since I taught “Red Badge” many decades ago, I was struck by the lack of idealism Crane described in your namesake Henry, who seems to be motivated by a desire for excitement in a “heroic”, “Greek-like struggle.” Or in any of his comrades. This was fiction, but Crane had talked to many veterans. Good, everyman name choice.
Merci amigo! I always felt for his mother, him being too young to know better, how she must have worried about his life being on the line. Thank you for your service to better our world.
To Chris Mackowski – Is Bonaventure a bastion of liberalism these day or at least the journalism department?
And if one gets rid of Lost Cause-ism who am I going to ‘debate’ – on Quora?
How do you define “liberalism”?
I’ve enjoyed reading Chris’s thoughtful commentary to Kevin Levin’s Substack discussion and also many of the responses to it, especially the respectful back and forth with William Henck and M.A. Kleen. Many excellent points have been made by all.
If it is okay to go a bit meta historically and throw something out there to put a larger perspective on things… Jubal Early is a contemporary of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. All three men were born within five years of one another. All three men became fountainheads of powerful political mythologies that reshape history to serve a specific social or political end. The Lost Cause intellectual high point in America about coincides with Marxism’s societal breakthrough in Europe, especially with the Bolshevist revolution and brutal political take over of Russia. The Lost Cause has more or less been intellectually defeated in America (the Lost Cause is not an international idea), arguably completely so at the academic and national institutional level of American society. That can not be said though of Marxism despite a century’s worth of communism being put into practice around the world.
Have we heard enough about the Lost Cause? The answer is probably no because it was a successful and useful weltanschauung and such thinking is difficult if not impossible to subdue especially when it continues to be useful as a social or political end to those who believe in it, or even by those who do not believe in it and abhor it.
Peace out!
This is in reply to M.A. Kleen’s reply above “to NYGiant1952’s comment about the Dred Scott decision—That’s true and many Southern unionists argued that slavery was best protected by remaining in the Union, that secession would only lead to the destruction of the institution it sought to protect, and they were proven right. Although I think slavery was destined for the dust bin of history anyway.”
The idea that “slavery was destined for the dust bin of history anyway” is a bit of an “easy way out” in my humble opinion. I’ve heard that excuse from Lost Cause proponets for years.
I guess the question is, when? Would slavery still have been around into the 20th century if a monumental internal war had not set the stage for its abolition? I sincerely think it possibly could have lasted that long. Slaveholders during the antebellum years had shown how adaptable slavery was to changes caused by the industrial revolution and technological innovation. Look at how many enslaved people labored in iron furnaces, tobacco factories, saw mills, various mining operations, and industrial sugar production in what would become the Confederate states.
How much damage to individuals and families could have occurred if it had lasted, say another 30 or 40 or 50 years? The enslaved population only grew during the antebellum years. It would have continued to do so if slavery had lasted for another three, four, or five decades.
And how far would slavery’s existence into the 20th century have pushed back the advances that the Civil Rights movement finallly made? Would 2000s and 2010s have been the 1950s and 1960s?
May I recommend a book for those who think slavery would have died out on its own: Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon. Please read it.
Thanks, Tim. I hardly think the idea that slavery would die out on its own is unique to Lost Cause proponents. Legal chattel slavery in the Western Hemisphere ended in 1888 when Brazil became the last country in the Americas to formally abolish it. All the arguments that slavery would perpetuate in the American South certainly applied to Brazil. Brazil passed several abolitionist laws in the 1870s and ’80s, culminating in a presidential decree in 1888. Obviously abolishing slavery in Brazil did not alleviate all residual problems relating to race-based slavery any more than the 13th Amendment did here. But Brazilians, like everyone else in the Western Hemisphere, realized slavery was not a good system of labor. In addition to being morally reprehensible, slavery is simply not viable in a modern economy for all the same reasons that socialist economies inevitably fail — a slave has no personal stake or motivation to excel beyond basic survival. Every society in human history that practiced slavery had, by in large, premodern economies that could never have competed with free market or mixed capitalist economies. They were basically stagnant. An enterprise that employs workers who have agency and economic freedom will always out perform and out innovate one that uses slave labor every single time. Certainly, Southerners were smart enough to eventually figure that out, and I don’t think it would have taken that long.
In 1860, the economy of what would become the Confederate States of America was the fourth richest in the world. It was “modern economy” in every sense of the word. Banking, insurance, world-wide marketing, it had it all. Should some compromise agreement between the USA and CSA have averted war and created an independent CSA, it seems a far stretch of the imagination that they would have given that up what created all of that anytime soon due to any outside pressure. About the only things that would have brought about a reckoning with slavery anytime soon would have been a boycott on cotton by importing nations or a massive enslaved rebellion.
If lessons of the past tell us much anything about those in power in the slave states of the United States, it is that they listened to and heeded no one outside their line of thinking except by force. And that carried on into Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Massive resistance was their response to it all. A couple more book reccomendations: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist and Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power by Jefferson Cowie.
That “wealth” includes the value of the slaves themselves, i.e., not in actual goods and services. The Southern economy was far, far behind the North. It was essentially a monoculture, which might produce wealth in the short term but is not sustainable. They were basically riding high on an economic bubble in 1860, which is why their economy crashed so hard so fast as a result of the blockade. They had to buy everything from Northern manufacturers and overseas. When they couldn’t do that, because they couldn’t sell their one or two profitable crops (i.e. cotton or tobacco), they had shortages of everything. Every book on the Civil War begins with a comparison of the Northern economy vs., the South – it’s not even close. That’s like Civil War 101. The fact is that an independent Confederacy would have eventually seen the value of free labor like every other country in the Western Hemisphere. Now, that doesn’t mean it would suddenly embrace racial equality or wouldn’t have some kind of apartheid like South Africa. Or something like slavery like sharecropping. That’s a whole other issue.
Slavery was definitely not on the way out in 1860-61. It was thriving. For example New Orleans’ economic heyday was the postbellum period up until the end of the 19th century. Cotton boomed postbellum. There were in fact more white sharecroppers postbellum than black sharecroppers. Slavery would have carried on for sure, but for it being ended by the Constitution and further political legislation, which was where politics was hurtling towards and a reason for the Civil War itself. When that day would happen who knows? It could have happened in the coming decades if northern Democrats and Republicans allied themselves to end it through the Constitution, and given Southern Democrats would have kept to the Constitution. There would have been western European diplomatic pressure to end slavery as well. The collapse of King Cotton would have done great damage perhaps. It’s anyone’s best guess when it would have ended, but it would have ended some time before now.
I agree … slavery may have been an archaic institution in 1860, but cotton was still king …. cotton prices were booming, the British textile industry ran almost entirely on this Southern staple and Upper South enslavers were already putting enslaved labor into industrial ironworks, railroads, and textile mills … without the war, the institution easily had another two generations of life left as it further entrenched itself across the southern slave economy.
The ultimate irony is that Southern fire-eaters destroyed their own “peculiar institution” by choosing secession … by rushing into war to permanently preserve and expand slavery, they brought about its total annihilation in just four years—leaving their economy bankrupt, their infrastructure shattered, their social system destroyed and one in four military-age men dead.
I remember a character in a john Ford’s movie saying that if the legend is better than the reality, then print the legend. I have absolutely no problem with that. By contrast, I’m deeply worried when I read that you expect hate mail in the comments!!!
I have been a keen reader of your posts ever since the CW sesquicentennial. Over the years i have admired your honesty as a historian whose work is based on facts and primary sources. Whenever an honest historian feels threatened when he initiates a debate, it’s civilisation that is threatened …
I admire you, Chis Mackowski.
Pierre Mende.
My experience over fifteen years is that any time I criticize the Lost Cause, some readers will get their hackles up, that’s all. I suspect some of those older readers have given up on me by now. 😉
I appreciate your kind words and support. Thanks for being with us at ECW for so long!
The question “Have we heard enough about the Lost Cause?” sets up a false choice. For those who study and write history without an ideological axe to grind, the Lost Cause is simply bad history—a romanticized mythology that swept the nation because people love an underdog story, especially when presented with little countervailing evidence. Many of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s bought into that attractive narrative in our youth until primary sources and serious historical inquiry showed us otherwise.
The people who still hold to the Lost Cause are not necessarily malicious; most have simply absorbed a pervasive cultural storyline. There is nothing wrong with someone admiring the tactical skill of a Confederate commander or honoring the physical bravery and endurance of a southern ancestor who fought in the ranks. But genuine history requires acknowledging the full context: they were men of their time fighting directly to preserve and expand a brutal system of racial servitude.
Historians do not get to declare “we’ve heard enough” simply because debunking a myth is tiresome or repetitive. Myth thrives whenever good scholars stop taking the field. The only durable antidote to bad history is good history—patiently, rigorously, and objectively presented through the evidence.
As a word of explanation: When Kevin Levin asked whether we’ve heard enough about the Lost Cause, he had a practical reason for asking. His blog, Civil War Memory, covers all aspects of that wide topic; his reader suggested that Kevin was spending too much time focused on the Lost Cause to the detriment of other aspects of memory. As a writer/editor, he has to make choices about what to write about as he balances his editorial content.
You make a great point that “people who still hold to the Lost Cause are not necessarily malicious.” I do think they are sometimes willful, though, in their resistance to the “primary sources and serious historical inquiry” that showed you (and me!) otherwise. The rest of your point in your second paragraph is well said.
I do think the reader has a point, though I can’t speak to Kevin’s blog specifically. When I hear about Civil War memory, the focus is usually entirely on the Confederacy and Lost Cause as though the winning side didn’t even have a say in how the war was remembered, which is just silly. I’ve said it before, it should be called “Confederate Memory” if that’s where the focus is going to be. That’s fine if that’s all you’re interested in. Lord knows, the field of history has a lot of niches. But I can understand why that reader is burnt out on the topic. Maybe it’s just not for him.
thanks Chris … appreciate the clarification.
I was remiss for not thanking you for this wonderfully evocative post … you have people coming out of woodwork to comment … please feel free to lob the occasional hand grenade to make sure your subscribers are paying attention.
Well done you!!!
To M.A.: To Kevin’s credit, he realized the reader probably did have a point, as you say.
To Mark: I’m glad you enjoyed the piece. I think there’s been a lot of good discussion here today.
I was fortunate to grow up in Kansas, so Lost Cause talk rarely drifted north from Texas. But what I did hear was pronounced as fact, and is still alive here in Virginia. This is where road side markers celebrate the site where someone’s arm is buried, or where an old white dude who claimed (without proof) that he fired the first shot at Ft Sumter was buried. As a foot note, he took his own life rather than live in equality with people of color.
All that and more is revered by a certain camo-wearing class of folks around here. I prefer to wear my John Brown shirt at battlefields, and enjoy his heritage.
Of course we haven’t heard enough about the Lost Cause – the Civil War is endlessly fascinating and instructive. The vituperative attacks on it, as well as the racist Noble Crusade fantasies are wearying, but folks are entitled to their opinions. We should all agree, however, that we have heard enough of biographies on Abraham Lincoln as Saint Abe, sent down from to purge America of its original sin (what ridiculous reparations-seeking BLM nonsense that is) – more than 1,000 of them. I like “the real Abe,” as Shelby Foote did, “not the post-war construct of him.”
Black Lives Matter (BLM) defines reparations as compensation owed to Black Americans to address the lasting legacy of slavery, Jim Crow laws, racial violence, and structural discrimination.
So, the reparations are not limited to just the injustice of slavery.