The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History

Description

Nine distinguished historians debunk the myth of the Lost Cause

Was the Confederacy doomed from the start in its struggle against the superior might of the Union? 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 history—creating a volume that makes a significant contribution to Civil War historiography.

Introduction, Gary W. Gallagher
The Anatomy of the Myth, Alan T. Nolan
Jubal A. Early, The Los Cause and Civil War History, A Persistent Legacy, Gary W. Gallagher
Is Our Love for Wade Hampton Foolishness?: South Carolina and the Lost Cause, Charles J. Holden
These Few Gary-haired, Battle-Scarred Veterans: Confederate Army Reunions in Georgia (1885-1895), Keith S. Bohannon
New South Visionaries: Virginia's Last Generation of Slaveholders: The Gospel of Progress and the Lost Cause, Peter J. Carmichael
James Longstreet and the Lost Cause, Jeffrey D. Wert
Continuous Hammering and Mere Attrition: Lost Cause Critics and the Military Reputation of Ulysses S. Grant, Brooks D. Simpson
Let the People See the Old Life as It Was: Lasalle Corbell Pickett and the Myth of the Lost Cause, Lesley J. Gordon
The Immortal Confederacy: Another Look at Lost Cause Religion, Lloyd A. Hunter

Sujets

• Civil War Period
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• History of the Americas
• Historiography
• American Civil War
• United States
• Civil War
• Guerre de Sécession
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 novembre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253109026
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History
Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
www.iupress.indiana.edu
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First paperback edition 2010 © 2000 by Indiana University Press
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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
The Library of Congress cataloged the original edition as follows:
The myth of the lost cause and Civil War history / Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-33822-0 (cl : alk. paper) 1. Confederate State of America—Historiography. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Historiography. 3. Confederate States of America—History. 4. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. I. Gallagher, Gary W. II. Nolan, Alan T. E487 .M97 2000
973.7’13’072—dc21                                                                      00-036978
ISBN 978-0-253-22266-4 (pbk.)
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Contents
Introduction
Gary W. Gallagher
One: The Anatomy of the Myth
Alan T. Nolan
Two: Jubal A. Early, the Lost Cause, and Civil War History: A Persistent Legacy
Gary W. Gallagher
Three: “Is Our Love for Wade Hampton Foolishness?”: South Carolina and the Lost Cause
Charles J. Holden
Four: “These Few Gray-Haired, Battle-Scarred Veterans”: Confederate Army Reunions in Georgia, 1885–95
Keith S. Bohannon
Five: New South Visionaries: Virginia’s Last Generation of Slaveholders, the Gospel of Progress, and the Lost Cause
Peter S. Carmichael
Six: James Longstreet and the Lost Cause
Jeffry D. Wert
Seven: Continuous Hammering and Mere Attrition: Lost Cause Critics and the Military Reputation of Ulysses S. Grant
Brooks D. Simpson
Eight: “Let the People See the Old Life as It Was”: LaSalle Corbell Pickett and the Myth of the Lost Cause
Lesley J. Gordon
Nine: The Immortal Confederacy: Another Look at Lost Cause Religion
Lloyd A. Hunter
Contributors
Index
Introduction
Gary W. Gallagher
White Southerners emerged from the Civil War thoroughly beaten but largely unrepentant. Four years of brutal struggle had ravaged their military-age male population, vastly altered their physical landscape and economic infrastructure, and destroyed their slave-based social system. They grimly acknowledged the superior might of United States military forces and understood the futility of further armed resistance. Yet the majority of ex-Confederates, who had remained hopeful of establishing a new slaveholding republic until late in the conflict, did not believe they had fought for an unworthy cause. During the decades following the surrender at Appomattox, they nurtured a public memory of the Confederacy that placed their wartime sacrifice and shattering defeat in the best possible light. This interpretation addressed the nature of antebellum Southern society and the institution of slavery, the constitutionality of secession, the causes of the Civil War, the characteristics of their wartime society, and the reasons for their defeat. Widely known then and now as the Lost Cause explanation of the Confederate experience, it drew strength from the pages of participants’ memoirs, from speeches at veterans’ reunions, from ceremonies at the graves of soldiers killed while serving in Southern armies and other commemorative events, and from artwork with Confederate themes.
The architects of the Lost Cause acted from various motives. They collectively sought to justify their own actions and allow themselves and other former Confederates to find something positive in all-encompassing failure. They also wanted to provide their children and future generations of white Southerners with a “correct” narrative of the war. Some tried to create a written record that would influence later historians. In terms of shaping how Americans have assessed and understood the Civil War, Lost Cause warriors succeeded to a remarkable degree. Robert E. Lee serves as an obvious example of that success. The commander of the Army of Northern Virginia was the preeminent Lost Cause hero (by focusing on him rather than on Jefferson Davis, ex-Confederates could highlight the military rather than the far messier political and social dimensions of the war), and by the second decade of the twentieth century Lee had joined Abraham Lincoln as one of the two most popular Civil War figures. Ulysses S. Grant, second only to Lincoln among those who had forged the Union triumph, inspired far less enthusiastic admiration than did the principal rebel chieftain. A speaker at the dedication of an equestrian statue of Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1924 illustrated this phenomenon, observing that Lee’s defeat “was but apparent.” “Long since has the impartial verdict of the slow-moving years crowned as the real victor of Appomattox not Ulysses S. Grant and his swarming armies, but the undefeated spirit of Robert E. Lee,” stated this man. “Long since have his enemies and detractors surrendered in their turn to this hero of defeat.” 1
Many Northerners who watched the developing Lost Cause school of interpretation worried that it might gain wide acceptance. For example, Frederick Douglass labored throughout the postwar decades to combat what he perceived as Northern complicity in spreading Lost Cause arguments. Aware that most former Confederates had not forsworn their belief in the rightness of their experiment in nation building, he complained in 1871 that “the spirit of secession is stronger today than ever.” Douglass described that spirit as “a deeply rooted, devoutly cherished sentiment, inseparably identified with the ‘lost cause,’ which the half measures of the Government towards the traitors has helped to cultivate and strengthen.” Nearly a quarter-century later, a publication sponsored by the Grand Army of the Republic in Massachusetts mounted an attack on what one of its subheadlines termed the “Lost Cause of Historical Truth.” Concerned that school textbooks had fallen under the sway of those who sought to mask the true causes and meaning of the Civil War, this article staked its position clearly in referring to the conflict as the “Great Pro-Slavery Rebellion.” In 1925, a Pittsburgh newspaper cheered news that a shortage of funds had stopped work on a massive Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Georgia: “Just enough work has been done to remind the traveler that ‘there is the lost cause, conceived in hatred, and interrupted in its course for want of support.’ Nothing could constitute a more appropriate insignia to a lost cause than an unfinished monument halted in its rise for want of sympathy.” 2
The sculptures at Stone Mountain eventually were completed, and Lost Cause symbols and interpretations remained visible and sometimes hotly debated throughout the twentieth century. Controversies erupted in the 1990s over the public display of Confederate flags in South Carolina and Georgia, the inclusion of Robert E. Lee’s picture on a flood wall along the James River in Richmond, and the presence of early-twentieth-century statues of Confederate heroes on the campus of the University of Texas. 3 The National Park Service’s handling of Civil War themes also has come under scrutiny. Should it administer the “‘Stonewall’ Jackson Shrine” (the plantation office where Jackson died in May 1863) as part of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park? Should Gettysburg be interpreted as the “high-water mark” of the Confederacy, a frame of reference well attuned to Lost Cause writings of the late nineteenth century? Should the Park Service try to bring slavery, which Lost Cause writers scrupulously sought to remove from their version of Confederate history, and other nonmilitary dimensions of the conflict into their interpretive schemes at battlefield sites? 4 Public discussion of such questions suggests the degree to which the Lost Cause remains part of the modern Civil War landscape.
The Lost Cause also has attracted significant attention from historians interested in its nineteenth-century manifestations as well as its long-term impact on American understanding of the Civil W