SYMHC Classics: Lost Cause of the Confederacy

This 2020 episode covers the myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. The Lost Cause was a distortion of the history of the U.S. Civil War that’s still affecting the world today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Coming up, we have an episode that references
the United Daughters of the Confederacy and that organization's role
in perpetuating the Lost Cause myth of the US Civil War.
We explained that very briefly in the upcoming episode, but
we wanted to re release our episode on the Lost
Cause to provide more thorough context. This originally came out

(00:24):
on December fourteenth, twenty twenty, and let me tell you,
listening to it before choosing it as a Saturday Classic
was wild and gave me some bizarre deja vu. Travel
with caution. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

(00:52):
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Holly, this
has been a weird year. What oh shut that normal?
I live in a closet. I mean, it's been a
weird year in general. It's been a really weird year
to work on this podcast. We recorded an episode back
in March where we talked about some of that and

(01:13):
how just strange it was to be working on the
show and living in this moment that was clearly historically significant,
that moment being the pandemic at that time, and that
sense of strangeness has really continued and also I think
escalated with the other things that have also happened since then. Yes,

(01:33):
future historians will have quite a lot of layers to
peel on this onion that is twenty twenty. Yeah, So,
like this whole sense of very surreal stuff like that
went on through the widespread protests against police brutality and
racism that started in the late spring and summer, and
now as we're recording this, the truly bizarre afterlife of

(01:57):
the twenty twenty presidential election. For most of this year
has really felt like either we just wrote an episode
that's suddenly not relevant anymore, or we've been working on
episodes feeling like they're just gonna come out in this
black hole of we don't know what the world is
going to be like. Then, is this gonna seem really
tone deaf when it publishes in a week and a half. Yeah,

(02:20):
So we're recording this on December first, Who knows what
the world is going to be like when it actually
gets to people's feeds. In a way, with all this
just bizarre, strange, disorienting chaos that we have all been
living through the election has felt uniquely disorienting because there
are clear historical precedents for the pandemic and the protests

(02:45):
and the conditions that led to the protests. And we
have talked about a lot of those things on the
show before, but while there have been disputed elections in
the United States, we don't really have a one to
one comparison to a sitting president having clearly lost the
election making all kinds of baseless and often verifiably false

(03:10):
claims about having actually won it in all caps in
all yes. However, another piece of this very strange post
election season is this attempt to just promote the idea
that the election was somehow rigged in favor of President
elect Joe Biden. And so if we look at things

(03:32):
more generally and we talk about attempts to create a
narrative to reframe a loss so that it will be
more favorable to the losing side, there are definite precedents
for that in history, and one of them is the
subject of today's episode, which is the myth of the
Lost Cause of the Confederacy, which was a distortion of
the history of the US Civil War that is still

(03:55):
affecting the world today, just a heads up that we
cannot possibly dealt into every conceivable nuance of this in
an episode. One of the many books about how the
Civil War is remembered is called Race and Reunion. The
Civil War in American Memory. That's by David W. Blighte.

(04:15):
And not counting the notes and the index of that book,
it is almost four hundred pages long, and the author
describes that as a quote synthetic and selective work on
a vast topic. So we are kind of looking at
the big picture overview of this and not every conceivable
facet of it. So the Lost Cause was part ideology,

(04:39):
part social movement. Since its purpose was to promote an
ahistorical interpretation of the US Civil War, we got to
start with a recap of what exactly the Lost Cause
was trying to undermine. Although there were other factors that
played a much smaller role, the primary issue that drove
the US Civil War was, of course slavery. You can

(04:59):
certainly make the argument that the North went toward to
preserve the Union, but under that argument, the reason the
Union was in jeopardy in the first place was still slavery.
And this was not a new division. Disagreements over slavery
and efforts to accommodate slave states for the sake of
keeping the Union together. Let's go all the way back
to before the drafting of the US Constitution, and they're

(05:22):
represented in the Constitution itself, so all the language that
we're about to talk about still exists in the Constitution today,
although the thirteenth and fourteenth Amendments supersedes some of it.
Article one, Section two sets up the framework for the
House of Representatives and how members of that body will
be apportioned. It reads, in part quote, Representatives and direct

(05:45):
taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may
be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers,
which shall be determined by adding to the whole number
of free persons, including those bound to service for a
term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths
of all other persons. So this is known as the

(06:06):
three fifths Compromise. And even though it doesn't specifically mention slavery,
everyone understood that other persons here met enslaved Africans. Southern
states wanted their enslaved population to count for the purpose
of apportionment, and that would give those states more legislative
power and help protect the institution of slavery. They did

(06:28):
not want their tax burden to increase by that amount, though,
so this solution was to count three fifths of the
enslaved population. Article one, section nine addressed the international slave trade,
though again without using that language. It reads quote, the
migration or importation of such persons as any of the
states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not

(06:51):
be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand,
eight hundred and eight. But a tax or duty may
be imposed on such importance not exceeding ten dollars for
each person. In other words, while the government could impose
a tax or a duty on enslaved people brought into
the country, it could not ban the international slave trade.

(07:13):
Before eighteen oh eight, and then Article four came to
be known as the fugitive slave clause. Quote. No person
held to service or labor in one state under the
laws thereof escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any
law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor,
but shall be delivered up on the claim of the

(07:35):
party to whom such service or labor may be due.
Delegates from the slaveholding states would not have accepted the
Constitution without these provisions, each of which protected slavery and
the interests of enslavers and slave states, And over time,
the growth of anti slavery sentiments and abolition movements in
the northern states became increasingly threatening to the slave states

(07:58):
of the South. To be clear, there were also abolitionists
in the South, including enslaved people advocating for their own
liberation and liberating themselves, but the national balance of power
between North and South is what we're really focused on here.
Beginning in about eighteen twelve, the United States started intentionally

(08:18):
admitting new states into the Union in pairs one slave
and one free state to maintain this purported balance, and
this continued until eighteen fifty, when California became the first
free state admitted without a corresponding slave state. The Compromise
of eighteen fifty was a collection of laws meant to
diffuse some of the tension from this shift, one of

(08:41):
those being a much stronger Fugitive Slave Act. In eighteen
fifty four, the Republican Party was established to try to
resist the expansion of slavery into the western territories of
the United States. By the election of eighteen sixty, it
was widely believed that the election of a Republican president
would spell the end of slavery and would prompt slave

(09:02):
states to secede from the Union. This came to pass
after Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected as president on November sixth,
eighteen sixty. After Lincoln's election, Senator John J. Crittenden of
Kentucky proposed a collection of constitutional amendments and Senate resolutions,
some of which would make slavery permanent in part of

(09:23):
the country, to try to head off a secession crisis. Unsurprisingly,
this proposal was supported by the slave states but denounced
by the free states, so it failed, and then on
December twentieth, eighteen sixty, South Carolina became the first state
to announce that it was seceding from the Union. South
Carolina issued a declaration of the Immediate Causes which induce

(09:46):
and justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.
This document read, in part quote, an increasing hostility on
the part of the non slaveholding states to the institution
of slavery has led to a distion in regard of
their obligations and the laws of the general Government have
ceased to affect the objects of the Constitution. Other states

(10:08):
issued similar documents when they succeeded. They're going to have
a couple of examples. This one's from Georgia quote. For
the last ten years, we have had numerous and serious
causes of complaint against our non slave holding Confederate states
with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have
endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace

(10:30):
and tranquility, and persistently refuse to comply with their express
constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and
by the use of their power in the Federal government,
have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of
the common territories of the Republic. This is from Mississippi quote.

(10:50):
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.
The greatest material interest in the world. Its labor supplies
the product which constitutes by far the largest and most
important portions of commerce on the earth. These products are
peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and
by an imperious law of nature, none but the black

(11:12):
race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products
have become necessities of the world, and a blow at
slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. Texas and
Virginia issued similar documents containing similar sentiments as well, And
while some of these documents did also spend a significant

(11:32):
amount of space discussing states' rights in general, the rights
that were being discussed all circled back to slavery. They
included things like the right to take enslaved people into
free states without their being freed as a consequence. So
these documents supported the slave states' rights to maintain slavery,
but not really the free states' rights to outlaw or

(11:53):
restrict it. A Constitution of the Confederate States was adopted
on March eleventh, nineteen sixty one. Unlike the US Constitution,
this one made several direct, specific references to slavery and
enslaved people. Ten days later, Alexander Stevens, vice President of
the Confederate States of America, delivered what came to be

(12:13):
known as the Cornerstone Speech. It said that this new
constitution had quote put at rest forever all the agitating
questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it
exists amongst us, the proper status of the Negro in
our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of

(12:34):
the late Rupture and present Revolution. So yeah, there were
of course cultural and economic differences between the North and
the South, and other issues that you could cite as
contributing factors in all of this, but there is overwhelming
documented evidence that the biggest issue and the one that
was the most important, with slavery. It seems unlikely that

(12:57):
the Confederate States would have shied away from that stance
had they won the war. Slavery was right there in
the Confederate States Constitution, including the clause quote no bill
of attainder expost facto law or law denying or impairing
the right of property in Negro slaves shall be passed.
But instead the Confederacy suffered a humiliating defeat that left

(13:19):
the question of how the nation could possibly be whole
again and how the South could envision itself after this
turn of events, And we're going to talk about that
after we pause for a sponsor break. After the US

(13:41):
Civil War, there were a lot of questions about how
to reunite the country, like what would states have to
do to be readmitted into the Union. What would former
Confederates have to do to earn some kind of pardon?
How could the places that had suffered material damage as
a result of the war be rebuilt? And how could
the social, economic, and political injustice that had both enabled

(14:05):
and grown from the existence of slavery be addressed and rectified.
We have talked about a lot of this in previous
episodes of the show that relate to the period of
US history known as Reconstruction, and those episodes include our
two parter on Robert Small's that we put out as
a Saturday Classic this summer, and our two parter on
the Wilmington Coup that came out in twenty eighteen. A

(14:27):
lot of these questions were practical, like would former Confederate
leaders have to stamp trial? What kind of services would
be provided for formerly enslaved people? Where would the money
come from to pay for those services? But some of
these questions were a little bit more abstract, like what
did this mean for white Southern identity? How could the
Southern States defend themselves from mockery, shame, and accusations of

(14:51):
treason from the white Southern point of view? Answers to
a lot of these more nebulous questions rested on a
set of ideas that came to be known as the
Lost Cause, as a term that was popularized by the
eighteen sixty sixth book of the same name by Edward
Pollard of Virginia. The biggest and most important piece of

(15:11):
the Lost Cause myth was that the Civil War had
not been about slavery. Southern states had seceded over the
issue of states' rights, and that had been the cause
of the war. According to this idea, still hear it
on occasion. I don't know if on occasion is even
strong enough. I'm being super polite. Even though the Lost

(15:32):
Cause narrative claimed that the Civil War was not about slavery,
it also reimagined slavery itself. According to Lost Cause proponents,
slavery was not an evil institution, and slavers in this
version of the story are benevolent. They looked after their
enslaved workforce, providing housing, clothing, and food, and generally giving
enslaved people a better life than they would have had otherwise. Also,

(15:57):
according to this narrative, enslaved people were happy, grateful, loyal,
dedicated to their enslavers. Folded into all of this was
the idea that people of African descent weren't capable of
handling their own affairs, that they somehow needed the guidance
and supervision of their enslavers. Even though the Lost Cause
took great pains to minimize the documented horrors of slavery,

(16:21):
it also contended that slavery was well on its way
to dying out on its own. Sort of a corollary
to this reimagining of slavery was the myth of the
Black Confederate, which became way more popular later on in
the nineteen seventies. In particular, like it had kind of
a heyday. This was the idea that enslaved black people

(16:44):
were so loyal and cared for that they willingly volunteered
to fight for the Confederacy in enormous numbers. Estimates for
how many Black Confederates there supposedly were are all over
the place. There anywhere from five hundred to one hundred
thousand such, depending on who you read. The reality is
that enslaved Africans were a massive source of labor within

(17:06):
the Confederate army. They worked as body servants, cooks, and
manual laborers, but they weren't soldiers, and they were not volunteers.
They were enslaved. Confederate forces also captured and enslaved free
black people in the places they moved through or occupied
during the war. Historian Kevin M. Levin has written a
whole book about this called Searching for Black Confederates The

(17:29):
Civil War's most persistent myths. Yeah, people like to use
photos of soldiers posing with their enslaved servants as like
some kind of evidence that there were a whole lot
of soldiers and that the person the picture is really
depicting is enslaving. The person next to them like that
is not a volunteer soldier who went with him. So

(17:52):
the lost cause ideology also framed the South's defeat as
something that was inevitable. Under this ideology, Confederate generals were brilliant,
they were gifted in their strategy and their tactics, and
the South was defeated only because the North had superior
numbers and resources. So the idea is the South was
just overwhelmed. So it wasn't that Robert E. Lee and

(18:15):
other Confederate leaders failed to develop an effective strategy to
offset the fact that the Northern states were more industrialized
and more densely populated. It was just that there was
no strategy that ever would have been enough. This idea
that the Confederate war effort was doomed from the beginning
is the source of that lost cause, Moniker. Within this reframing,

(18:37):
Confederate generals were universally gentlemen. All of the soldiers were
noble and gallant. White women were also perfect examples of
Southern femininity. They had sacrificed for the cause of freedom
and had borne up under immense struggle. More broadly, Antebellum
life in the South was described as universally genteel and refined,

(19:00):
with plantations romanticized as idyllic, expansive homes and fields, rather
than the reality, which was that they were slave labor camps. Yeah,
so I woant to take a minute for like a
more personal note. I understand that for a lot of
people this history is very personally important to them and
their families. If you're about to write us an angry
email about your second or third great grandfather who served

(19:23):
for the South, I have second and third great grandfathers too,
so I get it, Like you want to think that
your ancestors were on the right side of history, but
they really just were not in this case. Eventually, proponents
of the Lost Cause ideology started to reframe the period
of reconstruction as well, and under this idea, reconstruction was

(19:46):
not an attempt to repair the damage of the war
and to address injustice. It was an effort to just
punish the South in exact retribution. And Northerners who came
to the South to assist with this whole process were not,
according to Lost Cause proponents, motivated by altruism or philanthropy.
According to the Lost Cause, they were unscrupulous, corrupt carpetbaggers

(20:09):
who were only in it for the money, money that
they were going to get illegitimately. So we referenced Edward
Pollard's book The Lost Cause earlier, and while that book
did popularize this term, the movement itself is not something
that just started and ended with one book. It was
much bigger. Glimmers of the Lost Cause ideology were present

(20:29):
at least as early as General Robert E. Lee's farewell
address also called General Order Number nine, delivered the day
before he surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, and that began
quote after four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed
courage and fortitude. The Army of Northern Virginia has been
compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. I need

(20:52):
not tell the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles,
who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have
consented to this result from no distrust of them, but
feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that would
compensate for the loss that would have attended the continuance
of the contest. I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice

(21:13):
of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen.
After the war was over, white Southern women's groups that
had been focused on providing aid during the war started
instead focusing on memorializing the fallen and honoring returning soldiers.
And some of this certainly included absolutely legitimate work like

(21:34):
burying the dead and holding funerals, and helping to care
for women and children who had lost their husbands and fathers.
But running alongside all of that work were efforts to
reinforce the idea of the Southern War effort as this noble,
doomed endeavor that was not about slavery. In the late

(21:54):
eighteen sixties. Men's veterans groups became part of this effort
as well. The Southern Historical Society was established in April
of eighteen sixty nine to ensure that this version of
Civil War history would be remembered. Former Confederate General Jubile A.
Early was the Southern Historical Society's first president and was

(22:14):
a major proponent of the Lost Cause. Although many Confederate
memorials were built much later, which we will talk about,
some were raised in the years immediately after the war
was over. In April of eighteen sixty six, Jefferson Davis,
who had been President of the Confederate States, went on
a tour to dedicate memorials in multiple cities, including Montgomery, Alabama,

(22:37):
and Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia. Prominent Confederate figures were also
lionized after their deaths, depicted as noble, nearly flawless heroes
in eulogies and early biographies. This included Robert E. Lee,
who died on October twelfth, eighteen seventy. Biographies written shortly
after his death characterize him as a devout Christian who slavery,

(23:01):
even though his cruelty to his own enslaved workforce, including
breaking up their families and either ordering or carrying out
the whipping of people who escaped, was documented. His opinions
on the supremacy of the white race were also very
well documented. Yeah, he was definitely a Christian, but that
did not somehow undo the other part. Jefferson Davis was

(23:24):
similarly eulogized after his death on December sixth, eighteen eighty nine.
More than one hundred thousand mourners paid their respects as
his body lay in state in New Orleans, Louisiana, and
then from there his remains were taken by train to
their final resting place in Richmond, Virginia, and this train
made stops along the way, with the crowds honoring his

(23:45):
passing by laying magnolia blossoms on the tracks and firing
their guns into the air. At Sometimes these crowds were
so large the train had to stop so they could
be cleared away. Not every former Confederate figure was similarly treated, though.
For example, after the war, former Confederate General William Mahone
became one of the leaders of the Readjuster Party in Virginia.

(24:08):
This party was a coalition of black and white political
leaders that dominated Virginia politics from eighteen seventy nine to
eighteen eighty three, with many black members of the coalition
being elected into state and federal office. Mahone's presence at
Confederate reunions had to be sort of explained away, with
organizers stressing that everyone should remember his wartime service rather

(24:31):
than focusing on his political career. By the eighteen nineties,
the Lost Cause ideology was immensely popular in the South,
and it was gaining traction elsewhere. The magazine Confederate Veteran
was launched in eighteen ninety three, and by nineteen hundred
it had more than twenty thousand subscribers, and it was
by far the most popular and widely read journal in

(24:52):
the South. The United Daughters of the Confederacy was established
in eighteen ninety four and was heavily involved in promote
the Lost Cause myth. In eighteen ninety six, the Confederate Museum,
which was initially focused on a Lost Cause interpretation of
the war, was opened in Richmond, Virginia. Historians and commentators
criticized the Lost Cause ideology. Throughout all of this, there

(25:16):
were grains of truth to it, such as that there
were white women who had made huge sacrifices during the
war and soldiers who had volunteered out of a sense
of patriotic duty, but a lot of it was just
flatly false. Critics pointed out that the Lost Cause narrative
tried to erase all kinds of horrors, including the existence
of the Ku Klux Klan and the practice of lynching,

(25:39):
while also leaning on racist depictions of black people that
allowed the clan in lynching to flourish. Black leaders and
their white allies also noted that accepting the false tenets
of the Lost Cause meant abandoning Black Americans in the
work of reconstruction and erasing the horrors and ongoing destructive
legacy of slavery. Abolitionists and other reformers called for the

(26:02):
rejection of this entire narrative. At the same time, though
in a lot of the North and at the federal level,
there was also this sense that accepting the Lost Cause narrative,
or at least not pushing back against it too hard,
might help unify the nation and allow it to heal
from the war. However, this purported reunification, but the emotional

(26:25):
healing of white people ahead of everyone else, particularly black Americans.
So in terms of national politics, the Northern States were
complicit and allowing this fiction to stand for the sake
of the Union at the expense of some of the
Union's most marginalized citizens. I see this as a continuation
of all those earlier concessions and appeasements that go all

(26:47):
the way back to the drafting of the Constitution, and
the lost cause was still being reinforced well into the
twentieth century, and we are going to get into that
after a sponsor break. Much of the national dialogue following

(27:08):
the US Civil War had been about reunification and reconciliation
and coming together, and eventually this included soldiers who had
been on opposite sides of the war. Although there had
been smaller events earlier on the first major Civil War
reunion involving soldiers from both sides was the Manassas Piece

(27:29):
Jubilee in July of nineteen eleven. This happened at the
start of a series of fiftieth anniversary remembrances that would
go on until nineteen fifteen. About ten thousand people attended
this event, including about three hundred Confederate and about one
hundred and twenty five United States veterans. A much larger
event took place in nineteen thirteen, with more than fifty

(27:51):
three thousand veterans assembling at Gettysburg. This was a massive event,
with states in the federal government providing funding for every
saying from getting veterans to Gettysburg to feeding them and
providing emergency medical care while they were there. Most of
the veterans attending this were very elderly, and the weather
was brutally hot, so that medical care was a vital

(28:12):
part of the plan. Yeah, and even with it, there
were people who died on the scene at the reunion
because they were in their advanced years and the weather
was just punishing. Again. The theme with all this was
reconciliation and healing, but again for white people at the
expense of black people who had been harmed by slavery

(28:33):
in the war and their descendants who were still being
harmed by ongoing racism and violence. And the words of
the Washington b which is a newspaper with a predominantly
black readership based in Washington, DC quote, the occasion is
to be called a reunion, a reunion of whom only
those who fought for the preservation of the Union and
the extinction of human slavery. Is it to be an

(28:56):
assemblage of those who fought to destroy the Union and
propare slavery, and who are now employing every artifice and
argument known to deceit and sophistry to propagate a national
sentiment in favor of their nefarious contention that emancipation, reconstruction,
and enfranchisement are dismal failures. Some of the most visible

(29:18):
remnants of the Lost Cause ideology came about during the
presidency of Woodrow Wilson. He came into office in nineteen thirteen.
The first film screening at the White House happened during
his presidency. It was the film Birth of a Nation,
originally known as the Klansman, which included quotes from one
of Wilson's history books, A History of the American People.

(29:40):
Wilson was a proponent of the Lost Cause and the
Dunning School, named for historian William A. Dunning, who interpreted
reconstruction as a failure. Birth of a Nation embraced the
Lost Cause ideology, using racist depictions of black Americans to
frame reconstruction as deeply damaging to white people it is.
He was also credited with a resurgence in the Ku

(30:02):
Klux Klan, which is depicted in the film, saving the
South from the horrors of Reconstruction. By the time Wilson
became president, Reconstruction was long over and many of the
gains and civil rights for black Americans that had been
implemented during that time had already been lost. Wilson was
the first Southern president elected since Reconstruction, and he continued

(30:25):
that trend of rolling back civil rights, including segregating or
allowing his cabinet to segregate a number of federal bureaus
and offices, as well as the US Navy. Wilson ran
for a second term as president on a platform that
included keeping the United States out of World War One,
but after he was elected, he began preparing to go

(30:47):
to war, including constructing new camps for training newly recruited
military personnel. This is when US military bases started to
be named after Confederate leaders, even though those leaders fought
against the US military during the Civil War. So after
the end of the Civil War, the US Army had
occupied eleven Southern states, with troops being removed after the

(31:11):
state had met with requirements to rejoin the Union. The
last of these troops were removed after the eighteen seventy
six presidential election, and that was one of the disputed
elections that we nodded to at the start of the show.
The candidates in this election were Democrat Samuel Tilden and
Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Tilden had won the popular vote

(31:33):
but didn't have enough votes to be declared the winner,
and the Electoral College and then the electoral College votes
from three states were disputed. The result was the Compromise
of eighteen seventy seven. Hayes would become president, and in exchange,
among other concessions, he agreed to place a Democrat in
his cabinet and to withdraw the federal troops that were

(31:54):
still occupying parts of the South. This is generally seen
as the end of Reconstruction, and for decades there wasn't
a large military presence in the South. Because of the
legacy of Reconstruction, the idea of sending troops to the
South had become something of a taboo. But less than
forty years later, the expansion of the military and preparation

(32:15):
for World War One meant that camps had to be
built in the South. We needed a lot of camps,
we had to put them somewhere. So as part of
the effort to make these encampments more palatable in the
places where they were being built, they were named for
former Confederate generals and other Confederate military figures, including camps

(32:36):
named for Robert E. Lee and Pierre G. T. Beauregard, which,
along with others, were built in nineteen seventeen. Encampments named
for General Braxton Bragg and General Henry Lewis Benning followed
in nineteen eighteen. It really became a standard practice for
new encampments and forts built in the South to be
named after Confederate military leaders, even though again these were

(33:00):
the enemy of the U. S. Army during the Civil War.
As these bases were being built, another trend was developing,
that of erecting statues to honor Confederate soldiers, many of
which were arranged and funded by the United Daughters of
the Confederacy. Although as we said earlier, some memorials were
built just after the Civil War, their number really started

(33:23):
to grow after about eighteen ninety, with the first Surgeon
statues peaking between nineteen ten and nineteen thirty. As we've
talked about in our previous episodes on the Harlem hell
Fighters and Red Summer. There was an intense backlash against
the great migration of Black Americans to more northern states
and against Black Americans advocacy for equal rights. These newly

(33:46):
erected statues were part of that backlash by the white majority,
and another smaller surge in their installations happened during the
civil rights movement of the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. Yea,
they were sort of part fromer of Who's in charge
here and part ongoing whitewashing of the Civil War. Although

(34:10):
some cities could afford to hire a professional sculptor to
create the monument, a lot of these were mass produced
and ordered through the mail. One major supplier was Monumental
Bronze Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, whose US and Confederate Soldier
statues were almost identical except for whether they had a
US or a CS on the belt buckle. Meanwhile, one

(34:33):
of the most widely popular pieces of lost Cause fiction
came into print and then to the screen, Gone with
the Wind, which debuted in nineteen thirty nine and was
based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell that came out
three years earlier, so, as we have alluded to, we
still see glimpses of the city. But in the post
World War two era, more historians started returning to the

(34:55):
subject of the Civil War and the Lost Cause, which
by this point had made it its way into history
textbooks all over the country. Historical sites and museums also
started re examining their collections and their missions after the war,
as these institutions started trying to more accurately represent the
war and its repercussions. This has really been an ongoing,

(35:17):
many year effort. The Museum of the Confederacy, which we
mentioned earlier, merged with the American Civil War Center in
twenty thirteen to form the American Civil War Museum, and
that's a museum that tries to give a more honest
look at the Civil War. But you can still see
glimpses of the Lost Cause narrative all over the place,
and this decade's long failure to honestly reckon with the

(35:40):
Civil War has done so much damage. Polls about how
many Americans know or don't know that the Civil War
was about slavery or regular occurrence, but it's not just
whether people know a particular fact about history. The Lost
Cause ideology contributed to racist violence and discrimination all over
the United States, and as we've already mentioned, it put

(36:02):
the emotional healing of the idea of the nation and
of white people in the South ahead of justice for
formerly enslaved people and their descendants. So this is a
great example about how this kind of false narrative is
not just about whether people know a particular intangible truth.
It also has real and ongoing consequences that we still
feel today. Yeah, we still see them in our inbox

(36:26):
in response to episodes. From time to time, I have
gotten in arguments with friends about that whole States Rights business,
and I'm like, two own slaves. They're right, that's what
I can't. Yes, there's a weird to me. I will
say it is weird. The romanticism of that is strange

(36:49):
to me because I don't as much as I love history,
I don't tend to romanticize it in that way, you
know what I mean, Like, it's not part of my
cultural identity that I am from lines of this that,
and I you know, I don't have that investment. So
it's a little hard sometimes for me to understand the
attachment to it. Yeah, I am pretty sure. Like I

(37:09):
have not looked at every single person in the entire
family tree, but pretty sure on both sides of my family.
In the eighteen sixties, everyone in the family tree was
living in North Carolina. There are definitely people in my
family tree and direct ancestors of mine who served for
the Confederacy, And like, I totally understand, as I said

(37:33):
earlier that like people don't want to imagine bad things
about their ancestors, right, But to me, regardless of any
of those individual people's reasons for serving, they were still
serving as part of, you know, a group of states
that had established themselves as a slave nation in an

(37:55):
army that was fighting a war to extend and protect. Like,
whatever your personal reasons for that, that's still a side
that you were on. Yeah. Yeah, well, and it's one
of those things I don't know if it will help
people reconcile it, right, the nuance of the individual versus
the individual's part in a larger group, how much they're

(38:18):
influenced by what they grew up with, and how that
has probably you know, had probably warped their perception of
right and wrong, particularly in regard to this issue. I mean,
it's still as you said, it comes down to that
is the side you were on. Yeah, I don't it's
a little it's hard for people to accept even now,

(38:38):
and I don't know the way through that. I think
there are a lot of groups doing a lot of
good effort, and some of the stuff that we talked
about right there at the end of like trying to
really take an honest look at things and reckon with
it is a big part of that. But yeah, it's
a weird it's a weird thing. There's a lot of
psychology to it to be unravel. Yeah. You and I

(39:01):
were talking about something totally different earlier this week, and
I was saying, how a lot of times when we
look at things, we have to sort of hold multiple
contradictory truths about things in our heads at the same time.
And I think that's the case for a lot of
folks here. Yeah, And it's difficult but doable and important

(39:22):
to It's an important skill to learn to be able
to see multiple facets that are not always comfortable, right.
I mean, it's kind of what we're working on all
the time, right, Like, no one person is simple and
easily summated. They all had problems we all do. Yeah. Yeah,

(39:43):
they're all humans and fallible. Thanks so much for joining
us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us
a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com,
and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,

(40:03):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.