The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History

After Charlottesville, I have spent a fair bit of time on Facebook arguing about the Confederacy, the Civil War, and statues of Confederate heroes such as Robert E. Lee. My position is that the Confederacy was incorrigibly racist, that it started the war to defend slavery, and that its “heroes” should not be given statues because they were traitors. I am a conservative Republican and evangelical Christian, so my opposition to Confederate statues comes from the Right, not the Left, which always seems to catch people off guard.I mention this because I have been surpised by the defense of Confederate statues by my fellow conservatives and Christians. Not all of them, of course, but enough of them to disappoint me. Most of them defend these statues on slippery-slope grounds—e.g., if Lee today, then why not Washington and Jefferson tomorrow? They worry that taking down statues equates to erasing history. But as the conversation continues, someone else will join in with a rosy view of the Confederacy as a redoubt of state’s rights and small government in which slavery was an unfortunate but historically ancillary problem. (Talk about the erasure of history!)Historians term this point of view the myth of Lost Cause. It is an interpretation of the war that arose in the immediate aftermath of the Confederacy’s defeat in order to explain away that defeat away while simultaneously justifying the antebellum South’s way of life. It is a tendentious way of reading history, one that downplays the central role of slavery in both secession and the Confederacy, and romanticizes the valor of the Southern warfighter, who fell victim to the superior manpower and materiel—though not martial skill—of Northern forces.Unfortunately, writes Alan T. Nolan in his sketch of the Lost Cause interpretation, “The victim of the Lost Cause legend has been history, for which the legend has been substituted in the national memory.” The goal of this volume, as the editors put it, is “to build on previous literature by engaging various aspects of the white South’s response to defeat, efforts to create a suitable memory of the war, and uses of the Confederate past.”Nine authors examine various topics. Alan T. Nolan describes the contours of the Lost Cause interpretation (Chapter One). Gary W. Gallagher highlights the crucial role of Jubal A. Early in promulgating the myth (Chapter Two), while Lesley J. Gordon does the same for LaSalle Corbell Pickett, the wife of Major General George Pickett of “Pickett’s Charge” fame (Chapter Eight).Three authors examine how Lost Cause mythology was put to use in as many states: Charles J. Holden on South Carolina (Chapter Three), Keith S. Bohannon on Georgia (Chapter Four), and Peter S. Carmichael on Virginia (Chapter Five). Chapters Six by Jeffry D. Wert and Chapter Seven by Brooks D. Simpson examine how the Lost Cause interpreted the martial skill of James Longstreet and Ulysses S. Grant, leading Confederate and Union generals, respectively. Longstreet became the “Judas Iscariot” of the Confederacy, blamed for losing Gettysburg by Jubal A. Early, and reviled for working with Republicans during Reconstruction. Lost Cause historians gave (and give) Grant little credit as a leader for defeating Lee, attributing his success to his willingness to hammer Confederate forces into attrition by means of sheer numbers and mechanized weaponry. This allows Lost Cause historians to valorize—if not apotheosize—Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.Finally, Chapter Nine by Lloyd A. Hunger looks at “Lost Cause Religion,” namely, the entanglement of Protestant religion with the Confederate cause, so that the symbols of one became symbols of the other. As an evangelical Christian and a minister of the gospel, I read this chapter in particular as a warning to the present of the way that the gospel can be used and abused in support of self-interested ideology.The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History is an excellent book, but it is probably not the best book to read if you are unfamiliar with Civil War history generally or Lost Cause mythology specifically. It assumes a lot of background knowledge, and its assortment of essays do not make for a unified look at the topic. Historian John Fea has put together a list of essential readings on the Lost Cause, and this book makes the list, however. For that reason, and because it was so informative, I nonetheless recommend it highly to anyone with a decent background knowledge of the issues.

I would suggest reading the Lost Cause sources before reading this. It's not as bad as Bonekemper's book, but it's not much better. Interestingly enough, recently, professional historical consensus has drastically changed in a defining way on the extent to which the Southern view, or “Lost Cause,” has influenced American culture. Alan T. Nolan, Gallagher’s co-author in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, defines the “truce” between the North and South forged in the1880s as an expression of the “Lost Cause” itself. After stating that “The political legacy of the Lost Cause . . . facilitated the reunification of the North and South,” Nolan goes on to say that, “The virulent racism that the North shared with the South, in spite of northern antislavery views, was a premise of the Lost Cause and the principal engine of the North’s acceptance of it. The reunion was exclusively a white man’s phenomenon and the price of the reunion was the sacrifice of the African Americans.”It is at this point that an important assumption is made on the part of the current academic establishment. “The Lost Cause” becomes intrinsically tied to white supremacy, which oddly enough is a feature that already existed in the North. If this premise is accepted, the only significant factor “Lost Cause” mythology could have possibly offered, in addition to what both sides already shared in common, were the stories of southern heroes and culture before and during the war.Alan T. Nolan considers Nathan Bedford Forrest to be “a strange hero,” describing him as looking “on as his troops helped massacre black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow after they had surrendered” and then becoming a “prominent Ku Klux Klan leader.” Nolan leaves out the question of conflicting testimony in the incident. No mention is made of the performance of Forrest’s slaves as Confederate cavalrymen, his granting their freedom, their commitment to him after the war, and his reputation as a charitable employer to former slaves after emancipation. The Forrest responsible for disbanding the first Klan while disavowing any subsequent entities claiming to be part of the organization is unnoticed. Nolan offers no trace of the Nathan Bedford Forrest who kissed Lou Louis, a black woman, after giving a speech in support of an early civil right’s group in Memphis in 1875.Alan T. Nolan makes the case that “the Lost Cause . . . is a caricature of the truth. . .” when the war was actually a rebellion against the Constitution in which rich planters seceded in order protect the inhumane system of slavery, occupying land that was not theirs and attacking Fort Sumter, thus starting the war. Lincoln defended the United States with skill and success. Nolan’s goal is to “start again” by putting away “distortions, falsehoods, and romantic sentimentality of the Myth of the Lost Cause.” Nolan’s view has progressively come into vogue within the past forty years in most academic institutions. There exists the “Myth of the Lost Cause,” and there exists the unbiased truth.Of course, this interpretation would require the presupposition that northerners, having victoriously defeated the South in a costly war, were blinded enough by their own racism to the point of being duped by their recent enemy into conceding the moral high ground, all at a time when they were economically, politically, and socially more influential than the South. There is, of course, another way to interpret the collapse of the reconciliatory “truce” which remained the status quo until recently.

It is often said that the North won the Civil War in a military sense, but the South won the battle for how we remember the war. At least that was true for a roughly 100-year period from Reconstruction to the 1960s. For any serious student of history who is more interested in scholarship than mythology, this book is a must-have. The authors walk the reader through all the misleading pro-southern propaganda that was designed to present the Confederacy in the best possible light: states' rights, honor, tariffs, the myth of the "happy slave," economic differences, cultural differences--anything to distract from the undeniable importance of slavery. Yet while no serious academic historian has accepted states' rights as a major cause of the Civil War since the mid-20th century, the battle is far from over with regard to the American public. Large swaths of the American public are either unaware of--or actively resist--the overwhelming consensus among academic historians that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. Add this to your collection to give expertise and scholarship its proper due.

I had high hopes for this book; I wanted to understand why many were so keen to pull down statues of Lee and others in what had once been Confederate states. Alas, for me this book was as partisan and onesided as those it set out to debunk. For instance, the chapter on The Anatomy of the Cause was very short on evidence and very, very long on assertion, Some of what it asserted was, frankly, unnunanced. Yes, the desertion rate in the CSA armies was high, but Nolan fails to note the likely reason, which was that the South's agrarian economy meant 'plough furloughs', for instance, and while we are told the war was caused by the South's commitment to keeping slavery, we are asked to take this on trust. The section on Robertson's biography of Jackson is especially embarrassing; Nolan seems not to understand that Robertson is not saying that Jackson was a saint, but that he was a religious fanatic. The sections on popular culture are the very worst; Nolan seems not to have read Gone With The Wind, but takes his citations from the film. The book is actually much more explicit about the Klan than the film; however, both Mitchell, a Catholic, and Selznick, who was Jewish, are equivocal about the Klan, and Mitchell portrays Ashley and Rhett dismantling it with great approval. Not all the freed slaves are portrayed as bad; indeed one of them actually rescues Scarlett from rape, and the book's only real rape is the marital rape it uncomfortably portrays. This is not to deny that GWTW a shockingly racist book - no sane person would deny that. It is however to say that it's actually more subtle than Nolan will allow, and the same can be said of Gods and Generals, which shows Jackson actively advocating the Black Code of killing those who surrender on more than one occasion. The chapter on Lee can't hold a candle to Pryor's powerful and sophisticated study. The chapter on Longstreet was an ominshambles; since few now think that Gettysburg was critical, can we not admit that Longstreet failed as well as Lee? The most interesting chapters were those on who had influenced the growth of the myth, especially the one on the Pickett family, but on the whole this book made me think that the American antiSouthern movement is now as hotheaded and almost as irrational as the purveyors of the myth of the Old South..