Lost Cause of the Confederacy

[32][33]Lost Cause advocates point to a perceived chivalric tradition of the South as evidence for the CSA's cultural and martial superiority to the North,[34][35] relying on nationalistic narratives of the fanciful Southern Cavalier descended from the English Royalists[36] or the Norman knights of William the Conqueror.

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.

"[47] 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.

It was a landscape dotted with figures drawn mainly out of the past: the chivalric planter; the magnolia-scented Southern belle; the good, gray Confederate veteran, once a knight of the field and saddle; and obliging old Uncle Remus.

In a letter to Early, Lee requested information about enemy strengths from May 1864 to April 1865, the period in which his army was engaged against Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant (the Overland Campaign and the Siege of Petersburg).

In another letter, Lee wanted all "statistics as regards numbers, destruction of private property by the Federal troops, &c." because he intended to demonstrate the discrepancy in strength between the two armies and believed it would "be difficult to get the world to understand the odds against which we fought".

[76]The Yale historian David W. Blight wrote: The Lost Cause became an integral part of national reconciliation by dint of sheer sentimentalism, by political argument, and by recurrent celebrations and rituals.

We have had national peace since the war ended, and we will always have it, and I think the way Lee and his soldiers conducted themselves in the hours of surrender has a great deal to do with it.From the beginning of the 20th century through the 1920s, Confederate statues were raised as a symbolic complement to the Jim Crow laws of the South.

Written out too were the competing memories and identities that set white southerners one against another, pitting the planters against the up-country, Unionists against Confederates, Populists and mill workers against the corporations, home-front women against war-besotted, broken men.

The historian John Coski noted that the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), the "most visible, active, and effective defender of the flag", "carried forward into the twenty-first century, virtually unchanged, the Lost Cause historical interpretations and ideological vision formulated at the turn of the twentieth".

In the mid-twentieth century, the battle flag simultaneously became ubiquitous in American culture while, partly through the efforts of the Ku Klux Klan, becoming increasingly tied to racial violence and intimidation."

Caroline Helen Jamison Plane was the president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) chapter in Atlanta and in 1915 planned a project to carve a memorial of Confederate figures at Stone Mountain.

She wrote: "Since seeing this wonderful and beautiful picture of Reconstruction in the South, I feel that it is due to the Ku Klux Klan which saved us from Negro domination and carpet-bag rule, that it might be immortalized on Stone Mountain".

In 2012, author Edward H. Sebesta described how Lost Cause ideology is placed in Texas history books: "Rebel leader Jefferson Davis, is elevated to peer status with Abraham Lincoln; slaveholder Thomas J.

Bohan explains: "After the Civil War, from the 1870s through the 1910s, public schooling became more widespread in the South, and Confederate sympathizers wanted to ensure that their children received an 'appropriate' education on Southern history and culture.

Mary Church Terrell, who was a suffragist, civil rights activist, educator, and one of the founders of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs in 1896, wrote a letter advocating against the Mammy monument.

When most of the men had left for the war, women had taken command of the homestead, found substitute foods, rediscovered their old traditional skills with the spinning wheel when factory cloth became unavailable, and had run the farm or plantation operations, including the management of enslaved African Americans the elites considered property.

[175] According to Drew Gilpin Faust, a campaign was mounted by newspapers and political leaders such as Jefferson Davis, alongside writers of poetry and song, exhorting Southern women to revive the production of cloth goods at home.

They staged the contest between Reconstruction opponent and Democratic candidate Wade Hampton and incumbent Republican Governor Daniel H. Chamberlain as a religious struggle between good and evil and called for "redemption".

[184] The UDC was especially influential across the South in the early 20th century, where its main role was to preserve and uphold the memory of Confederate veterans, especially the husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers who died in the war.

Its long-term impact was to promote by Lost Cause iconography an idealized image of the prewar plantation South as a society that was crushed by the forces of Yankee modernization, which also undermined traditional gender roles.

Remembered as a leader whose soldiers would loyally follow him into every fight no matter how desperate, Lee emerged from the conflict to become an icon of the Lost Cause and the ideal of the antebellum Southern gentleman, an honorable and pious man who selflessly served Virginia and the Confederacy.

Because Gettysburg was perceived as the "high tide of the Confederacy", the loss there was seen to have led to the failure of the entire war to achieve independence for the South, the blame for which was hung on Longstreet's disinclination to attack.

These charges stuck because Longstreet was already disparaged by many high-profile Southerners due to his reputation as a "scalawag", caused by postwar endorsement of and cooperation with his close friend and in-law, President Grant.

[197] Following the war, the national media, including Northern newspapers and magazines, printed articles that contributed to a trend of portraying Lee as the unconquerable Southern general who was victorious even in his surrender at Appomattox, through his devotion to duty and his resolve to help rebuild the South and educate its youth.

Most of them embraced the sentimental narrative of a valiant Confederacy overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of Union fighters and its superior resources, and Robert E. Lee was vitally important as a symbol sustaining this romantic interpretation of events.

[202] Scholar Peniel E. Joseph said in Time magazine that Du Bois, an African American author, civil rights activist, and Pan-Africanist, published Black Reconstruction in America in 1935 to expose the myths and lies of the Lost Cause.

[222] The romanticization of the Lost Cause is captured in films such as The Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind, Song of the South, and Tennessee Johnson—the latter of which the San Francisco Chronicle called "the height of Southern mythmaking".

[226]David W. Blight wrote: From this combination of Lost Cause voices, a reunited America arose pure, guiltless, and assured that the deep conflicts in its past had been imposed upon it by otherworldly forces.

[232] Woodworth called the movie "the most pro-Confederate film since Birth of a Nation, a veritable celluloid celebration of slavery and treason": Gods and Generals brings to the big screen the major themes of Lost Cause mythology that professional historians have been working for half a century to combat.