With the removal of Stonewall Jackson’s statue in Richmond, the collapse of the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War is apparently underway. In today’s New Yorker, historian David Blight compares the bringing down of the bronze Confederates and the 1989 Twilight of the Communist Idols. Here are some excerpts:
In November, 1989, when the Berlin Wall suddenly began to crumble and then fall, much of the world watched in awe. Could it be true that Communism was about to collapse? For seventy years, it had been a system, an ideology, that ordered large swaths of the globe. Now a whole vision of history—a vision meant to maximize freedom, but which had turned, over time, into tyranny—seemed to be leaving the stage.
Many people still possess, as I do, little pieces of concrete from the Berlin Wall. And many of us feel some awe in seeing, during these past few weeks, Confederate monuments in America likewise reduced to pieces, relics of the collapse, after a hundred and fifty-five years, of the public vestiges of the Lost Cause tradition. The summer of 2020, like the autumn of 1989, could mark the death of a specific vision of history. If so, it has taken a long, long night—to borrow from Robbie Robertson and the Band—to drive old Dixie down.
We should not celebrate too much as monuments topple and old slave-auction blocks are removed. History did not end when the Soviet Union dissolved, and it will not end now, even if a vibrant movement sweeps a new age of civil rights into America. Most of all, we must remember what the Lost Cause is and was before we try to call it past….
The Lost Cause is one of the most deeply ingrained mythologies in American history. Loss on an epic scale is often the source of great literature, stories that take us to the dark hearts of the human condition. But when loss breeds twisted versions of history to salve its pain, when it encourages the revitalization of vast systems of oppression, and when loss is allowed to freely commemorate itself in stone and in sentimentalism across the cultural landscape, it can poison a civil society and transform itself into a ruling regime. Some myths are benign as cultural markers. Others are rooted in lies so beguiling, so powerful as engines of resentment and political mobilization, that they can fill parade grounds in Nuremberg, or streets in Charlottesville, or rallies across the country.
The Lost Cause ideology emerged first as a mood of traumatized defeat, but grew into an array of arguments, organizations, and rituals in search of a story that could regain power. After the Civil War, from the late eighteen-sixties to the late eighteen-eighties, diehards, especially though not exclusively in Virginia, and led by former high-ranking Confederate officers, shaped the memory of the war through regular publications and memoirs. They turned Robert E. Lee into a godlike Christian leader and a genius tactician, one who could be defeated only by overwhelming odds. Their revolution, as the story went, was a noble one crushed by industrial might, but emboldened, in the eighteen-seventies, by righteous resistance to radical Reconstruction, to black suffrage, and to the three Constitutional amendments that transformed America.
The Lost Cause argued that the Confederacy never fought to preserve slavery, and that it was never truly defeated on the battlefields of glory. Lost Cause spokesmen saw the Confederacy as the real legacy of the American Revolution—a nation that resisted imperial and centralized power, and which could still triumph over rapid urbanization, immigration, and strife between labor and capital. Above all, the Lost Cause seductively reminded white Americans that the Confederacy had stood for a civilization in which both races thrived in their best, “natural” capacities. The slaughter of the Civil War had destroyed that order, but it could be remade, and the whole nation, defined as white Anglo-Saxon, could yet be revived.
By the eighteen-nineties, the Lost Cause had transformed into a widespread popular movement, led especially by Southern white women in the United Daughters of the Confederacy (U.D.C.), and by an increasingly active United Confederate Veterans association (U.C.V.) and its widely popular magazine, The Confederate Veteran. The first commander-in-chief of the U.C.V. was General John B. Gordon, a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia and a former governor and senator for that state. Gordon became famous for his particular brand of reconciliation, which involved popular lectures that humanized soldiers on both sides of the war, and for his tales of the “kindliest relations” between masters and slaves in antebellum times. He is one of the ten former Confederates for whom United States military forts are named across the South.
From the eighteen-nineties through the First World War, as Jim Crow laws and practices spread across Southern states, and as lynching became a ritual of terror and control, it was organizations like the U.D.C. and U.C.V. that placed hundreds of monuments, large and small, all over city squares and town centers. By 1920, virtually no one in the South, black or white, could miss seeing a veterans’ parade, or a statue of a Confederate soldier leaning on his musket with sweet innocence and regional pride. Schools, streets, and parks were named for Confederates. And, at one dedication after another, the message sent to black Southerners was that the Lost Cause was no longer lost. It had, instead, become a victory narrative about the overturning of Reconstruction and the reëstablishment of white supremacy. The myth had become the ruling regime, which governed by law and by violence, and because it controlled the story. What’s more, the nation largely acquiesced to, and even applauded, this dogged Southern revival.
The language of the Lost Cause, as well as its monumental presence, is now what many of us desire to banish. But as we do so it is useful to hear its chords, since they still echo today in precincts of the American right. In 1868, Edward A. Pollard, the former editor of a Richmond newspaper, in his book “The Lost Cause Regained,” urged “reconciliation” with conservative Northerners, as long as it was on Southern terms. “To the extent of securing the supremacy of the white man,” he wrote, “and the traditional liberties of the country . . . she [the South] really triumphs in the true cause of the war.” Such an achievement would take years, but it did come. When a former Confederate officer, John T. Morgan, addressed a meeting of the Southern Historical Society, in 1877, he framed the preceding nine years as the “war of Reconstruction.” The South, he maintained, had just won this “second war,” and therefore no one “need inquire who was right or who was wrong” in the first war. This was never easy for Union veterans to swallow, but it was how white supremacy became an integral part of the process of national reconciliation.
Confounding as these arguments may seem to most twenty-first-century minds, Lost Cause spokesmen were deadly serious, and their ideas propped up a story that many Americans still accept. Around Memorial Day in Richmond, 1890, when the spectacular Robert E. Lee equestrian statue was unveiled before a crowd of up to a hundred and fifty thousand people, a Lee cult seemed in total triumph. Confederate flags waved everywhere. A women’s memorial association had managed to wrangle many factions into agreement on a design and artist for the statue, and on elaborate ceremonies to anoint it. Twenty-five years after Appomattox, the general who had led the crusade to divide and destroy American democracy stood high astride his monument, the first in a series of statues that became Monument Avenue. Much of the Northern press called the statue evidence that Lee had become, as the New York Times put it, a “national possession.”
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