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In early , Sherman marched virtually unimpeded through the Carolinas, Grant tightened his grip on Richmond and Petersburg, and tens of thousands of Union troops were transferred into the Eastern Theater. Its implementation was laughable—two companies of black medics were assembled in the Richmond area. The Confederate Congress and people had made it clear that they would rather lose the war than give up slavery. Slavery hampered Confederate diplomacy and cost the South critical support from Great Britain and France, even though these powers, dependent on Southern cotton and happy to see the American colossus split in half, had good economic and political reasons to support the rebels. When the reality of the slavery problem on the international front finally sank in, last-minute, half-hearted, blundering efforts to trade emancipation for diplomatic recognition failed. Slavery and white supremacy similarly hampered Confederate efforts to swap prisoners of war with the Union. Since the rebels were greatly outnumbered, they should have been eager to engage in one-for-one prisoner swaps. When blacks began fighting for the Union, however, Davis and Lee refused to exchange any black prisoners on the grounds that they were Southern property. Blacks lucky enough to survive after capture many did not were returned to their owners or imprisoned as criminals. Lincoln and Grant insisted that black prisoners had to be treated and exchanged the same as whites. Because the North benefitted militarily, it did not hesitate to stop all prisoner exchanges when Davis and Lee would not back down. The Confederacy occupied an enormous territory equivalent to most of western Europe that had to be conquered in order for the North to claim victory and compel the rebellious states to return to the Union. A tie or a stalemate would amount to a Southern victory because the Confederacy and slavery would be preserved. The Union, therefore, had to go on the strategic and tactical offensive, for every day of inaction was a minor victory for the Confederates a fact that too many Union generals failed to comprehend. Offensive warfare consumes more resources than defensive warfare. Had the South done so, making the North pay a heavy price for going on the offensive, it might have undermined Northern morale and ultimately Lincoln himself. If Lincoln had lost the election to a Democrat, especially George McClellan, the Confederacy likely could have obtained a truce, the preservation of slavery, and perhaps even independence, at least for portions of the South. The possibility of a Democratic victory in was by no means far- fetched. Until the end of that summer, Lincoln, like nearly everyone else, thought he was going to lose. Had the South fought more wisely , it might have so demoralized the voters of the North—who were already divided over controversial issues like emancipation, the draft, and civil liberties— that they would have given up on the war and Lincoln. First, he was a one-theater general apparently more concerned with the outcome in Virginia than in the Confederacy as a whole. He consistently refused to send reinforcements to other theaters and harmfully delayed them on the one occasion when he was ordered to relinquish some troops. Again and again, his actions indicated that he did not know or care what was happening outside his theater. For example, when he initiated the Maryland Antietam campaign of , he advised Davis to protect Richmond with reinforcements from the Middle Theater, where rebels at the time were outnumbered three to one. Second, Lee was too aggressive—both strategically and tactically. His Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns resulted in about forty thousand casualties the South could not afford, including the loss of experienced and talented veterans. Gettysburg also represented lost opportunities in other theaters because Lee kept his whole army intact in the East to invade Pennsylvania. Realizing that Lee was in need of exculpation, his advocates decided to make James Longstreet their scapegoat. They argued that Gettysburg cost Lee the war and that Longstreet was responsible for that loss. Lee should have sought a defensive battle instead of attacking an entrenched foe. They attacked the Union commander as a drunk and a butcher who won only by brute force. There is little evidence that Grant did much drinking in the Civil War and none that it affected his performance. Anyone contending that Grant won solely by brute force has failed to study his victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. The Lost Cause is a way of saying, 'good people can lose and we were good. Thomas agrees with the historical view that the U. And nobody had the will to do that. He can be reached by email at samuel. Facebook Twitter Email. Confederate monuments: Robert E. Lee, the general who became the face of 'Lost Cause' mythology. Show Caption. Hide Caption. The Confederate Reckoning: Why monuments and symbols are being removed. Northerners put the war behind them by turning their backs on blacks and letting Jim Crow happen. From to about , the Lost Cause version of events held sway across the United States. As I point out in my book Lies My Teacher Told Me , history textbooks also bought into the myth and helped promote it nationwide. But advocates of the Lost Cause— Confederates and later neo- Confederates—had a problem. The leaders of southern secession left voluminous records. The civil rights movement of the s and s prompted historians and teachers to review those records and challenge the Lost Cause. As states left the Union, they said why. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed South Carolina also attacked New York for no longer allowing temporary slavery. In the past, Charleston gentry who wanted to spend a cool August in the North could bring their cooks along. By , New York made it clear that it was a free state and any slave brought there would become free. South Carolina was outraged. Delegates were further upset at a handful of northern states for letting African-American men vote. Nevertheless, southerners were outraged. Supreme Court. Other seceding states echoed South Carolina. Once the Confederacy formed, its leaders wrote a new constitution that protected the institution of slavery at the national level. As historian William C. But the neo-Confederates are right in a sense. Slavery was not the only cause. The South also seceded over white supremacy, something in which most whites—North and South—sincerely believed. White southerners came to see the 4 million African Americans in their midst as a menace, going so far as to predict calamity, even race war, were slavery ever to end. This facet of Confederate ideology helps explain why many white southerners—even those who owned no slaves and had no prospects of owning any—mobilized so swiftly and effectively to protect their key institution. This historic map shows how the United States was divided in , as the Civil War began. All of the seceding southern states were heavily dependant on slavery. Keeping African Americans in bondage allowed slave owners to cheaply grow cash crops like cotton, rice and sugar cane. The other alleged causes of the Civil War can be dispensed with fairly quickly. The argument that tariffs and taxes also caused secession is a part of the Lost Cause line favored by modern neo-Confederates. But this, too, is flatly wrong. High tariffs had been the issue in the nullification controversy, but not in Why would it? Tariffs had been steadily decreasing for a generation. The tariff of , under which the nation was functioning, had been written by a Virginia slaveowner and was warmly approved of by southern members of Congress. Its rates were lower than at any other point in the century. The election of Lincoln is a valid explanation for secession—not an underlying cause, but clearly the trigger. None of this was secret in the s. Thus when people wrote about secession influenced what they wrote. They need to know it. Knowledge of historiography empowers students, helping them become critical readers and thinkers. Concealing the role of white supremacy—on both sides of the conflict— makes it harder for students to see white supremacy today. And it gives implicit support to the Lost Cause argument that slavery was a benevolent institution. This was true both during Reconstruction and in the s, when the modern civil rights movement gained strength. In other words, teaching the Civil War wrong cedes power to some of the most reactionary forces in the United States, letting them, rather than truth, dictate what we say in the classroom. Allowing bad history to stand literally makes the public stupid about the past—today. The South definitely went to war to preserve slavery. But did the North go to war to end slavery? The North went to war initially to hold the nation together. Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War His (e-bok) | ARK Bokhandel

And many of us feel some awe in seeing, during these past few weeks, Confederate monuments in America likewise reduced to pieces, relics of the collapse, after a hundred and fifty-five years, of the public vestiges of the Lost Cause tradition. The summer of , like the autumn of , could mark the death of a specific vision of history. If so, it has taken a long, long night—to borrow from Robbie Robertson and the Band —to drive old Dixie down. We should not celebrate too much as monuments topple and old slave-auction blocks are removed. History did not end when the Soviet Union dissolved, and it will not end now, even if a vibrant movement sweeps a new age of civil rights into America. Most of all, we must remember what the Lost Cause is and was before we try to call it past. As so many now understand—whether they have read William Faulkner or Toni Morrison or the thousands of scholars who have reshaped American history in the past three generations— slavery , the Civil War , Reconstruction , and segregation are never purely historical. They still haunt the air we breathe, or cannot breathe. They are what W. Lee can be carried out of the U. Capitol and left at the Smithsonian Castle, for a decision on their final resting place. The Lost Cause is one of the most deeply ingrained mythologies in American history. Loss on an epic scale is often the source of great literature, stories that take us to the dark hearts of the human condition. But when loss breeds twisted versions of history to salve its pain, when it encourages the revitalization of vast systems of oppression, and when loss is allowed to freely commemorate itself in stone and in sentimentalism across the cultural landscape, it can poison a civil society and transform itself into a ruling regime. Some myths are benign as cultural markers. Others are rooted in lies so beguiling, so powerful as engines of resentment and political mobilization, that they can fill parade grounds in Nuremberg, or streets in Charlottesville , or rallies across the country. The Lost Cause ideology emerged first as a mood of traumatized defeat, but grew into an array of arguments, organizations, and rituals in search of a story that could regain power. After the Civil War, from the late eighteen-sixties to the late eighteen-eighties, diehards, especially though not exclusively in Virginia, and led by former high-ranking Confederate officers, shaped the memory of the war through regular publications and memoirs. They turned Robert E. Lee into a godlike Christian leader and a genius tactician, one who could be defeated only by overwhelming odds. Their revolution, as the story went, was a noble one crushed by industrial might, but emboldened, in the eighteen-seventies, by righteous resistance to radical Reconstruction, to black suffrage, and to the three Constitutional amendments that transformed America. The Lost Cause argued that the Confederacy never fought to preserve slavery, and that it was never truly defeated on the battlefields of glory. Lost Cause spokesmen saw the Confederacy as the real legacy of the American Revolution —a nation that resisted imperial and centralized power, and which could still triumph over rapid urbanization, immigration, and strife between labor and capital. The slaughter of the Civil War had destroyed that order, but it could be remade, and the whole nation, defined as white Anglo-Saxon, could yet be revived. By the eighteen-nineties, the Lost Cause had transformed into a widespread popular movement, led especially by Southern white women in the United Daughters of the Confederacy U. The first commander-in-chief of the U. Gordon, a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia and a former governor and senator for that state. The reason the South fought the American Civil War has been contested ever since the Confederacy surrendered in The statue of Confederat Gen. Robert E. Lee in the center of Emancipation Park the day after the Unite the Right rally devolved into violence August 13, in Charlottesville, Virginia. They also argued, in direct contradiction to their secession statements, that the war was never about slavery. In addition, they gave the cause a hero. The film Gone With the Wind codified this imagery and made possibly the largest impact on public understanding of the Civil War in the twentieth century, creating a historical aesthetic replicated by hundreds of plantation tourist sites. Similarly, the popular conception of the actual war came to be dominated by an almost exclusive focus on the Confederate and United States armies, their leaders, strategies, and tactics. It celebrated the national union that produced modern American power. The outcome was a focus on military tactics at public history sites that obscured the larger causes of the Civil War and muted any recognition that the Confederacy had fundamental differences from the United States in its outlook on race and cultural politics. The Lost Cause fixation on Lee and Jackson flourished in this environment. This military history, combined with conventional political histories that equivocated on slavery, dominated the Civil War Centennial celebrations between and , and it thrived in mass produced toys like Marx playsets and in television series like The Gray Ghost and The Rebel In the mass culture of the twentieth century that celebrated national stories, some threads of Lost Cause history—like the alleged Reconstruction-era oppression of white people by corrupt carpetbaggers—became universal in the dominant American story, regardless of region. These tropes settled firmly into the interpretation of post-World War II museums and historic sites. The Civil War became a story of a military contest among white men against a backdrop of southern belles and silly, but loyal, slaves. Even as segregation laws began to erode in the s, this common interpretation at public history sites made for an exclusionary setting. In the academic world, historians such as Kenneth Stampp, John Hope Franklin, and John Blassingame undermined its basic historical assumptions. This generation wrote compellingly about the horrors of slavery and the resistance of black men and women to their oppressors. They portrayed enslaved people as human beings and agents in their own lives. At the same time, opponents of the emergent Civil Rights Movement harnessed Lost Cause racial tropes and Confederate iconography in an aggressively political fashion. Whereas the elite female protectors of Confederate history in the early twentieth century had done so through genteel ceremonies, ice-cream socials, fundraising, wreath- laying, and essay-writing contests, the new generation—growing ever-more blue collar and male—relied on that same history to fuel violent confrontations, the brandishing of Confederate flags at civil rights protestors, and the embrace of a militant Confederate cultural identity. By the s, mainstream museums and historic sites had begun to reflect the interests of social historians, and took African American history and interpretation seriously; while Civil War battlefields, both at National Park Service sites and state and local sites, continued to cater to the interests of military history aficionados. The June murders of black worshippers in Charleston, South Carolina by a young white man who had expressed racial sentiments that would not have been unfamiliar to Thomas Nelson Page forced the most widespread reckoning with Confederate iconography in American public life to date. South Carolina removed the Army of Northern Virginia Battle Flag that had flown on its statehouse and grounds since New Orleans, Baltimore, and a few smaller cities and towns took down statues and monuments to Confederate leaders and soldiers. However, most monuments that were erected in the heyday of the Lost Cause remain in place. Outside of partisan heritage organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and a few private and state funded historic sites, the Lost Cause in its fullest expression has no credibility. Some institutions born of the Lost Cause have adapted and evolved to reflect this ideology. In , the National Park Service responded to audience needs, pressure from Congress, and the calls of academic historians to move its battlefield interpretation beyond just military tactics and topics to include consideration of the larger issues at stake in the war in its Rally on the High Ground initiative. Other institutions—most notably private plantation historic sites—continue to appeal to the alleged romance of southern agricultural life and avoid fully explaining slavery. Yet outside of historic sites, museums, and academic history, popular conversations on social media and other informal arenas reveal that plenty of Americans continue to discount the cruelty of slavery, deny the role of the institution in secession, revere Robert E. Lee, and disregard the promise and tragedy of Reconstruction. A new, and false, historical claim that black men served in an integrated Confederate army is both an updated version of the loyal slave trope and a completely modern attempt to make the Confederate States acceptable to the world of diversity and inclusion. Lost Cause tropes rarely appear in credible historical publications or museums, but they continue to surface in popular expressions of white racial identity politics where resentment over African American history and a sense of beleaguered whiteness continues to permeate discussions. The Lost Cause did near-irrevocable damage to the long term inclusivity of museum and historic site audiences. In its original iteration, it directly supported white supremacy and racial exclusion. It fostered many racist assumptions and a very narrow narrative story of romantic plantations and courageous military actions. Therefore, museums and historic sites that approach southern and Civil War history need to be particularly careful not only to avoid perpetuating Lost Cause tropes, but also to develop interpretive and methodological approaches that actively refute its assumptions. While a proven solution to the alienation of non-white audiences from Civil War era historic sites has yet to be discovered, some reconsiderations of interpretive and methodological approaches may be useful. This institutional body language includes the physical appearance of a museum or site. Many Civil War battlefields and sites continue to fly reproduction Confederate banners on flagpoles adjacent to national and state flags in front of visitor centers, and to sell Confederate themed memorabilia with no interpretive context in gift shops. Getting the Civil War Right | Teaching Tolerance

After the Civil War, Lee became president of what is now Washington and Lee University, working to expand a small, struggling school in Lexington, Virginia. In his biography of Lee, Thomas noted the role of mediator Lee played between the population of freedmen and his students, some of whom attacked Black residents. On several occasions, Lee dismissed students involved in attacks on Black people. Those actions, according to Thomas, were more about preserving the recently restored peace than about concern for freedmen and should not be taken as a sign Lee supported Reconstruction. His wife, Mary Custis Lee, wrote in post-war letters about the upended status quo and claimed the family had been robbed by Black people. The Lost Cause is a way of saying, 'good people can lose and we were good. Thomas agrees with the historical view that the U. And nobody had the will to do that. He can be reached by email at samuel. Facebook Twitter Email. Confederate monuments: Robert E. Lee, the general who became the face of 'Lost Cause' mythology. Show Caption. Hide Caption. The Confederate Reckoning: Why monuments and symbols are being removed. In addition to aspiring to become slave-owners, these other whites could at least endure their low economic and social status by embracing their superiority to blacks in Southern society. As of , therefore, slavery was a thriving enterprise. It benefitted only whites, treated blacks in a sub-human manner, and promised to return great profits and social benefits for whites for years to come. Late-war and postwar apologists for the Confederacy have consistently maintained that slavery had little or nothing to do with secession. Nothing could be further from the truth. The United States had been embroiled in disputes over slavery ever since the Declaration of Independence and the U. The Missouri Compromise of , with its focus on slavery in the territories, was the first major indication that the North-South split on the issue was widening. During the s, with the rise of abolitionism in the North, slave revolts and perceived slave revolts in the South, and the growth of the Underground Railroad to aid runaway slaves, sectional differences became more heated. In the s the pot boiled over. The multi-part Compromise of contained a strengthened fugitive slave provision that caused consternation and defiance in the North and then anger in the South when many Northerners flaunted it. Guerilla warfare between pro- and anti-slavery settlers broke out in Missouri and Kansas. When President James Buchanan in supported a fraudulent pro-slavery Kansas territorial constitution, Douglas opposed him and split the Democratic party into Northern and Southern wings. The Southern-dominated court said Congress could not prohibit slavery in any territories as it had done in , , , , and and that blacks were not U. All these developments, along with the Lincoln-Douglas debates of ,1 set the stage for the presidential election of Slavery in the territories was virtually the only issue in the race. Republican Lincoln wanted slavery in none of them, Southern Democrat John Breckinridge wanted slavery in all of them, Northern Democrat Douglas wanted the issue decided in each territory by popular sovereignty, and Unionist John Bell ducked the issue. Lincoln, of course, won. The seven states of the Deep South seceded before Lincoln took office. The seceding states made their motives clear in many ways. The four states of the Upper South that seceded after the firing on Fort Sumter had the next-highest numbers. Finally, the four border slave states that did not secede had the lowest numbers of slaves per capita and the lowest percentage of family slave ownership of all slave states. But the best evidence that slavery was the driving force behind secession is the statements made by the states and their leaders themselves at the time, including the official state secession convention records, secession resolutions, and secession-related declarations. These documents make it clear that slavery was not only the primary cause of secession but virtually the only cause. As the states of the Deep South were in the process of seceding, moderates in Washington—especially Border State representatives—launched negotiations. All of them related to one issue: slavery. There could be no question about what was causing secession and driving the nation toward war. Pro-slavery and pro—white supremacy arguments were made by commissioners sent by the Deep South states to urge each other, the Upper South, and border states to secede. The commissioners first advocated for quick secession so the earliest seceding states were not alone; they also pushed for an early convention to form a confederacy. Confederate leaders made similar statements in defense of slavery in the early days of the Confederacy. President Jefferson Davis described the formation of an anti-slavery political party in the North, praised the benefits of slavery, and concluded that the threat to slavery left the South with no choice but to secede. Vice President Alexander Stephens said that slavery was the cornerstone of the Confederacy, Thomas Jefferson had erred in stating that all men are created equal, and the Confederacy was based on equality of whites and subservience of blacks. The Constitution of the Confederacy was similar to that of the United States but added provisions for the protection of slavery. Tellingly, it even contained a supremacy clause conferring final legal authority on the central government, not the states. Statements of their leaders demonstrate the major role that slavery played in their leaving the Union. Adherents of the Myth of the Lost Cause, in order to minimize the role of slavery in secession and the formation of the Confederacy, have alleged that thousands of black soldiers fought for the Confederacy. That did not happen. It was clear to certain Southern military leaders that the outmanned Confederacy needed to resort to slaves as soldiers if they hoped to have a chance of success. Davis, has just proclaimed that secession and the Confederacy were all about slavery, rejected the idea. The need for such an approach became more obvious as a result of the huge rebel casualty counts in and By late , the Confederates had suffered irreplaceable casualties in Virginia and Georgia, lost Atlanta, lost Mobile Bay and then Mobile, and lost the Shenandoah Valley. Their fate had been sealed by the November reelection of Lincoln, the steel backbone of the Union. That event was followed by the loss of Savannah, as well as the twin disasters at Franklin and Nashville, Tennessee. Therefore, Davis and Lee belatedly began to see that without using slave soldiers the Confederacy was certainly doomed. Nevertheless, their moderate proposals to arm and free slaves were fiercely resisted by politicians, the press, soldiers, and the people of the South. They feared such an approach would lead to black political, economic, and social equality and invoked the ever-reliable doctrine of protecting Southern womanhood. In early , Sherman marched virtually unimpeded through the Carolinas, Grant tightened his grip on Richmond and Petersburg, and tens of thousands of Union troops were transferred into the Eastern Theater. Its implementation was laughable—two companies of black medics were assembled in the Richmond area. The Confederate Congress and people had made it clear that they would rather lose the war than give up slavery. Slavery hampered Confederate diplomacy and cost the South critical support from Great Britain and France, even though these powers, dependent on Southern cotton and happy to see the American colossus split in half, had good economic and political reasons to support the rebels.

The “Lost Cause” Goes West | California History | University of California Press

Close mobile search navigation Article navigation. Volume 97, Issue 1. Previous Article Next Article. Article Navigation. Research Article February 01 This Site. Google Scholar. California History 97 1 : 33— Views Icon Views. Get Permissions. Cite Icon Cite. All rights reserved. You do not currently have access to this content. View full article. Sign in Don't already have an account? Client Account. You could not be signed in. Sign In Reset password. Sign in via your Institution Sign in via your Institution. Citing articles via Google Scholar. Email alerts Article Activity Alert. Did its forces fight heroically against all odds for the cause of states' rights? In reality, these suggestions are an elaborate and intentional effort on the part of Southerners to rationalize the secession and the war itself. Unfortunately, skillful propagandists have been so successful in promoting this romanticized view that the Lost Cause has assumed a life of its own. Misrepresenting the war's true origins and its actual course, the myth of the Lost Cause distorts our national memory. In The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, nine historians describe and analyze the Lost Cause, identifying ways in which it falsifies historycreating a volume that makes a significant contribution to Civil War historiography. Forfatter Larry H. Kort om boken A ';well-reasoned and timely' Booklist essay collection interrogates the Lost Cause myth in Civil War historiography. Did its forces fight heroical…. Oppdag mer American Civil War. History of the Americas. Modern history to 20th century: c to c Larry H.

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