The post-Civil War defense of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy included opposition to the passage of the 15th Amendment granting Blacks the right to vote. In 1869 Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts described how the Lost Cause advocates would be remebered.
Daily Globe
Saturday, Feb 13, 1869
Washington (DC), DC
Page: 10
Early in his speech on the 15th Amendment, Wilson describes how history will remember the partisans of the Lost Cause. He claims that the children of the those who “champion the lost causes of slavery, caste, and human inequlity” will “seek to hide the shame of such an ancestry.”
Rather than seek to deny their ancestry, many of the descendants of the Confederates claimed in the 20th Century that their ancestors had not fought for slavery or opposed racial equality.
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