Lost Cause of the Confederacy
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The Lost Cause is the name commonly given to a literary movement that sought to reconcile the traditional society of the Southern United States to the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the Civil War of 1861–1865. Those who contributed to the movement tended to portray the Confederacy's cause as noble and most of the Confederacy's leaders as examplars of old-fashioned chivalry, defeated by the Union armies not through superior military skill, but by overwhelming force.
History
The South was devastated both economically and psychologically by its defeat in 1865. Many Southerners sought consolation in attributing their loss to factors beyond their control and to betrayals of their heroes and cause. The term Lost Cause first appeared as the title of an 1866 book by historian Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates.Ulrich, p. 1221. However, it was the articles written for the Southern Historical Society by Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early in the 1870s that established the Lost Cause as a long-lasting literary and cultural phenomenon.Early's original inspiration for his views may have come from General Lee himself. When he published his farewell order to the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee spoke of the "overwhelming resources and numbers" that the Confederate army fought against. 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 Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant (the Overland Campaign and the Siege of Petersburg). Lee wrote, "My only object is to transmit, if possible, the truth to posterity, and do justice to our brave Soldiers."Gallagher, p. 12. 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." Referring to newspaper accounts that accused him of culpability in the loss, he wrote, "I have not thought proper to notice, or even to correct misrepresentations of my words & acts. We shall have to be patient, & suffer for awhile at least. ... At present the public mind is not prepared to receive the truth." All of these were themes that Early and the Lost Cause writers would echo for decades.
Lost Cause themes were taken up by memorial associations such as the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, helping in some degree the Southerners to cope with the dramatic social, political, and economic changes in the postbellum era, including Reconstruction.Ulbrich, p. 1222.
Tenets
Some of the main tenets of the Lost Cause movement were that:
- Confederate generals such as Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson represented the virtues of Southern nobility, as opposed to most Northern generals, who were characterized as possessing low moral standards, and who subjected the Southern civilian population to such indignities as Sherman's March to the Sea and Philip Sheridan's burning of the Shenandoah Valley in the Valley Campaigns of 1864.
- Losses on the battlefield were inevitable due to Northern superiority in resources and manpower.
- Losses were also the result of betrayal and incompetence on the part of certain subordinates of General Lee. (The Lost Cause focused mainly on Lee and the eastern theater of operations.)
- Defense of States' rights, rather than preservation of chattel slavery, was the primary cause that led eleven Southern states to secede from the Union, thus precipitating the war.
- Secession was a justifiable constitutional response to Northern cultural and economic aggressions against the Southern way of life.
In terms of Lee's subordinates, the key villain in Jubal Early's view was Lt. Gen. James Longstreet. Early's writings place the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg squarely on Longstreet's shoulders, accusing him of failing to attack early in the morning of July 2, 1863, as instructed by Lee. In fact, however, Lee never expressed dissatisfaction with the second-day actions of his "Old War Horse." Longstreet was widely disparaged by Southern veterans because of his post-war cooperation with President Ulysses S. Grant and for joining the Republican Party. Ironically, Grant's acceptance of the Lost Cause mythos, which derived from his unwillingness to reopen the arguments that had led to the war in the first place, may have significantly contributed to the movement's lasting popularity and influence.
Further adoption
A later manifestation of the Lost Cause mentality can been seen in Douglas Southall Freeman's definitive four-volume biography of Lee, published in 1934. In the annotated bibliography, Freeman acknowledged his debt to the Southern Historical Society Papers and Early by stating that they contain "more valuable, unused data than any other unofficial repository of source material on the War Between the States."Gallagher, pp. 24-25. Gallagher contends that Freeman "cemented in American letters an interpretation of Lee very close to Early's utterly heroic figure." In this work Lee's subordinates were primarily to blame for errors that lost battles. While Longstreet was the most common target of such attacks, others came under fire as well. Richard Ewell, Jubal Early, J.E.B. Stuart, A.P. Hill, George Pickett, and many others were frequently attacked and blamed by Southerners in an attempt to deflect criticism from Lee. (As mentioned above, Lee accepted total responsibility for his defeats and never blamed any of his subordinates.)The Lost Cause view of the Civil War also influenced the 1936 novel Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and the 1939 film of the same name. There Southerners were portrayed as noble, heroic figures, living in a romantic and conservative society, who tragically succumbed to an unstoppable, destructive force. A similar treatment appeared in D. W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.
Modern usage
Today, the Lost Cause is no longer a dominant theme of Civil War historians, even Southern ones. However, basic assumptions of the Lost Cause have proved remarkably durable in popular conventional wisdom about the war, particularly in the South. Gary Gallagher wrote that "a brief review of recent scholarly and popular literature, fiction, documentaries and films, and the thriving market in Civil War art reveals trends that almost certainly would bring a smile to Jubal Early's lips." Lost Cause beliefs have been encouraged by the neo-Confederate movement of the late 20th century, especially in the magazine Southern Partisan. Lost Cause tenets are also frequently voiced during controversies surrounding public display of the Confederate battle flag.See also
References
- Freeman, Douglas S., [R. E. Lee, A Biography] (4 volumes), Scribners, 1934.
- Gallagher, Gary, Jubal A. Early, the Lost Cause, and Civil War History: A Persistent Legacy (Frank L. Klement Lectures, No. 4), Marquette University Press, 1995, ISBN 0874623286.
- Ulbrich, David, "Lost Cause", Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History, Heidler, David S., and Heidler, Jeanne T., eds., W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, ISBN 0-393-04758-X.
Notes
Further reading
- Foster, Gaines M., Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913, Oxford University Press, 1988, ISBN 0195054202.
- Rearden, Carol, Pickett's Charge in History and Memory, University of North Carolina Press, 1997, ISBN 0807823791.
- Wilson, Charles Reagan, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920, University of Georgia Press, 1980, ISBN 0820306819.
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