REWRITTEN HISTORY: How the Confederacy Won the Narrative (Post-Truth II)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
History is written by the victors, but sometimes it's rewritten
by the losers. They lost the war, so they changed
the story. They erased the truth and replaced it with
something prettier, something easier to swallow. A neighbor cause, a
tragic hero, a year for freedom, not for slavery. Then

(00:27):
we believed. Then we built statues for them. We taught
our children their version of events. If you control the past,
you control the present. If you control the present, you
control the future.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Welcome to post Truth. I'm Michael Wheelan, and this is
episode two Rewritten History. In the last episode we examined
a story told to inspire virtue, a childhood fable about
George Washington and a cherry tree. A harmless lie, maybe,
but one that stopped. This time, we're not dealing with
moral tales. We're looking at deliberate distortion. The Civil War

(01:24):
ended in eighteen sixty five, the Confederacy was defeated, slavery
was abolished, and yet in the years that followed, a
different story took root. A story that denied slavery as
the cause of the war, A story that glorified Confederate leaders,
A story that transformed treason into heroism. And racism into heritage.

(01:45):
This wasn't accidental. It was purposeful, a campaign waged through books, monuments, classrooms,
and politics. It had a name, the Lost Cause. The
war ended, the fighting stopped, but the war over its

(02:08):
meaning had only just begun. When Confederate General Robert E.
Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox
Courthouse in April of eighteen sixty five, it marked the
symbolic end of the Confederacy. What followed was a country
in ruins. More than six hundred thousand Americans had died.
Southern cities were destroyed. Its economy, which had been built

(02:31):
entirely on slave labor, was wrecked. But the war's most
lasting legacy would not be written in ruins. It would
be written in ink. Immediately after the war, the Union
focused on restoring the country and securing rights for the
newly freed black Americans. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, with
some notable exceptions for prisoners. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed citizenship.

(02:54):
The fifteenth was meant to protect voting rights, and yet
few Confederate leaders were prosecuted. There were no mass trials,
there were no hangings. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy,
spent just two years in prison and was released without
ever facing trial. He went on to write memoirs defending
the Confederate cause. Robert E. Lee, the noted General, was

(03:17):
not punished. He was not executed, He was not even
stripped of property. He was allowed to retire to a
quiet life as president of Washington College. The decision not
to punish these men may have helped hold the country together,
but it came at a cost. It allowed them to
tell their own stories, and they did. In eighteen sixty six,

(03:38):
just one year after the war ended, a man named
Edward A. Pollard published a book called The Lost Cause,
a New Southern History of the War of the Confederates.
Pollard had been a newspaper editor in Richmond and a
Confederate sympathizer. His book framed the war not as a
rebellion fought to protect slavery, but as a noble struggle
for Southern rights and way of life. Pollard openly acknowledged

(04:00):
that slavery had been a cause of the war, but
he reimagined it as a benign institution, a system of
mutual dependence between master and slave. In doing so, he
downplayed the cruelty and violence inherent in slavery and redirected
Southern grief away from self reflection and towards self justification.
The term lost cause itself originated with Pollard. It wasn't

(04:22):
a description of what had been lost. It was a rebranding.
Pollard's ideas took hold because they offered the South something comforting,
dignity and defeat. They also offered the North something useful,
a way to reconcile without demanding accountability, and so with
few consequences for the rebellion, former Confederate leaders were able
to shape their own legacy. Jefferson Davis, after his release

(04:46):
from prison, spent years writing The Rise and Fall of
the Confederate Government, a sprawling two volume defense of secession.
He denied that slavery had been the central issue and
argued that states had a right to leave the Union.
He portrayed the South as the true protector of the Constitution,
painting the Confederacy not as a betrayal of American ideals

(05:06):
but as their truest expression. With books like Pollard's and
Davis's circulating widely, the foundations of the Lost Cause were laid.
These narratives were repeated in newspapers, public speeches, and eventually
school books. The Confederacy lost the war, but it began
to win the memory. What was missing from that memory
where the voices of the people who had suffered the most.

(05:29):
The enslaved. Reconstruction promised them freedom, land, and participation in democracy,
But as white Southerners regained control of local governments and
federal troops withdrew, those promises were erased. The rewriting of
history helped justify the return of white supremacy through law
and violence, and just as the history books were being revised,

(05:50):
new monuments began to appear. One of the most powerful
engines of that false history was the United Daughters of
the Confederacy, the UDC, founded in eighteen ninety four. This

(06:13):
wasn't simply a woman's heritage group. The UDC wielded political
and cultural influence, especially in the American South, and it
had a focused mission to shape how future generations would
remember the Confederacy. They funded monuments and memorials, hundreds of them.
These statues did not appear in the immediate aftermath of

(06:33):
the war. The majority were built between eighteen ninety and
nineteen twenty decades later, during the rise of Jim Crow,
these monuments weren't about mourning the dead. They were about
reasserting white dominance at a time when black Americans were
demanding equality. They placed these statues not in cemeteries, but
on courthouse lawns, public parks, and town squares, places of

(06:57):
civic authority. These figures, Lee Davis Jackson were lionized, but
the message wasn't subtle. The Confederacy and its racial order
still loomed over public life. These were not neutral memorials.
They were political statements. Figures like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson,

(07:17):
and Jefferson Davis were elevated as symbols of honour, valor,
and states rights. Inscriptions often spoke of heritage, sacrifice, and duty.
Rarely did they mention slavery, the primary cause of the
Civil War. By the mid twentieth century, these monuments had
become fixtures of public life, so commonplace that their origin
stories were forgotten. But they were never a political They

(07:41):
were designed to reinforce white supremacy, to cast the Confederacy
as righteous, and to intimidate those who challenged that story.
Alongside the statues came textbooks. The UDC compiled a measuring
rod to test textbooks. In nineteen nineteen, it instructed schools
to reject any history book that criticized the Confederacy, mentioned

(08:02):
the cruelty of slavery, or implied that the South had
been in the wrong. As a result, for decades, children
across the South were taught that the war was about tariffs,
not slavery, that enslaved people were well treated, and that
reconstruction had been a disaster caused by ignorant Northerners and
corrupt freedmen. But this wasn't just limited to textbooks. The

(08:24):
Lost Cause made its way into film and pop culture.
The Birth of a Nation in nineteen fifteen portrayed the
Ku Klux Klan as heroic saviors of the South. It
was even shown in the White House under President Woodrow Wilson.
Gone with the Wind in nineteen thirty nine depicted the
Antebellum South as genteel and gallant, with enslaved characters shown
as loyal and content. It became one of the most

(08:47):
popular films of all time and today still shapes the
way millions think about that era. By the mid twentieth century,
the Confederate monuments had become fixtures of public life, so
commonplace that their origin stories were forgotten. But they were
never a political They were designed to reinforce white supremacy,
to cast the Confederacy as righteous, and to intimidate those

(09:08):
who challenged that story. In recent years, these monuments have
come under scrutiny. Activist and historians have called for their removal,
not out of disdain for history, but out of a
desire to stop honoring a lie. In twenty seventeen, white
nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of
a statue of Robert E. Lee. The rally turned violent

(09:31):
one counter protester, Heather Higher, was killed. That moment became
a national flashpoint. Suddenly, these statues were no longer seen
as passive. They were reminders of an ongoing struggle over
whose history gets remembered and whose gets erased. Cities like
New Orleans, Richmond, and Baltimore have since removed prominent Confederate monuments.

(09:52):
In each case, the decision was met with both celebration
and outrage. Defenders claimed the removals were an attempt to
erase history. History critics countered no one is a racing
history or just refusing to enshrine lies in bronze. Many
of these statues had stood for over a century. Some
were erected not by local governments but by private groups,

(10:13):
often with public funds. Their removal raised new questions. Who
decides what history belongs in public space, who benefits from
these monuments, who is harmed. Statues are not just decorations,
they are signals. They tell the public who is worthy
of admiration, and for over a century, American cities have
been told to admire men who fought to keep others

(10:35):
in chains. This fight is not about marble or memory.
It's about meaning, and for a country built on an
ideal of liberty, the Lost Cause has proven to be
a long and lingering contradiction. In recent years, activists have
pushed to remove more Confederate monuments. Some have come down,
others remain, but every removal is met with resistance. Some

(10:58):
call it a racing history. In truth, it's removing a
false one. The Lost Cause wasn't about remembering the dead.
It was about rewriting the meaning of their cause and
installing that rewrite into stone. The Lost Cause didn't just

(11:34):
rewrite the past, it reshaped the present, and it still
echoes into the future. Culturally, it gave the South a
story that allowed it to feel proud of its role
in history without confronting the truth. It presented Confederate leaders
as figures of moral clarity and constitutional loyalty, not as
defenders of a system of racial slavery. That myth became

(11:55):
an accepted truth, repeated so often and so widely that
questioning it could be seen is unpatriotic. Politically, the narrative
helped justify the dismantling of reconstruction. It painted black political
participation as corrupt and incompetent. It cast federal intervention as tyranny.
In doing so, it laid the foundation for Jim Crow laws,

(12:16):
voter suppression, racial terror, and economic apartheid. The myth of
noble Confederates allowed white supremacy to survive, not only intact,
but institutionalized in schools. The effects were generational. Textbooks in
Southern states regularly omitted or distorted the causes of the war.
Even as late as the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties,

(12:36):
children in part of the South were taught that the
war was about tariffs or states' rights. Slavery, when mentioned
at all, was often described as benign. The people most
affected by the system of bondage, the enslaved themselves, were
often invisible. Even today, public polling reveals the legacy of
that miseducation. A twenty eleven Pew Research Center poll found

(12:59):
that nearly half of Americans believed that the Civil War
was mainly about states rights, not slavery. A twenty seventeen
poll from the Public Religion Research Institute found that forty
eight percent of Americans viewed Confederate monuments as symbols of
Southern pride rather than racism. This confusion is not accidental.
It's the product of a century long campaign to reshape

(13:20):
the country's memory. The Lost Cause became so effective that
even institutions designed to promote equality sometimes bawd to its influence.
Military bases named after Confederate generals, for instance, were not
a relic of the Civil War era, but were established
during World War One and two. The names were chosen
in part to placate Southern politicians and communities, preserving regional

(13:42):
unity at the cost of historical clarity. The myth even
shaped political rhetoric. Politicians from both parties avoided confronting the
past too directly. They praised heritage and tradition, often without
specifying whose heritage or what that tradition involved. Appeals to
you unity frequently came with the unspoken caveat that truth

(14:03):
might be too divisive. And that's the central cost of
the Lost Cause. It trades truth for comfort. It prevents reckoning,
It blurs accountability. It teaches that history is not something
to be confronted, but curated, a museum, not a mirror.
The consequences of that distortion are all around us, in

(14:23):
voter suppression laws that echo reconstruction rollbacks, in the violent
backlash to racial justice protest, in the refusal to teach
uncomfortable truths and classrooms, and in the insistence even now
that removing statues is an act of erasure, while erecting
them never was. The Lost Cause is not just a
Southern story. It became a national one because the whole

(14:46):
nation accepted the trade unity over justice, silence over truth.
But myths don't stay harmless forever. Left unchallenged, They harden
into belief, and belief when untothers from truth becomes something else,
entirely ideology. The Lost Cause taught us that you don't
need to win the war to win the story. You

(15:08):
just need time, silence, and enough marble. The Civil War
wasn't the last time America manipulated a narrative to serve
political ends. In fact, just a few decades later, the
United States was involved in a war it barely understood,

(15:31):
but sold to the public with headlines, banners, and manufactured outrage.
Next time, on post Truth Episode three, Breaking News, the
war that sold itself.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
They didn't report the news, they created it.