The Limits of the Lost Cause: Essays on Civil War Memory. By Gaines M. Foster. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2024. Hardcover, 280 pp. $45.00.
In spite of the title, this is not a two hundred and eighty page examination of the “Limits of the Lost Cause.” Like many collections of essays, some are right on point with the title, and others were too good to throw away but were only tangentially related to the central theme. Gaines Foster is a professor of history at Louisiana State University and he has been researching the continuing battle over the memory of the Civil War in the South and throughout the nation. This is nothing new for Professor Parsons, his well-regarded book Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South appeared in 1988, before most of us had even heard of “Civil War Memory Studies.” Some of the essays in this new book supplement his earlier work and others pursue new paths. Rather than try to summarize the disparate work in The Limits of the Lost Cause, I will remark on some of the salient essays.
The first essay questions C. Vann Woodward’s contention that the defeat of the Confederacy shaped Southern identity. Foster says that the white South’s defeat on the battlefield did not hinder its people recovering after 1865 and modernizing their social structure to replace romantic slavery with a legal and social system of what he calls the “racial separation and exploitation” of the Black third of the population of the South. After the end of Reconstruction, the Lost Cause told white Southerners that they had nothing to be ashamed of on the battlefield. They were overwhelmed by Union numbers, if not by natural intelligence or education. The Lost Cause meant that by the late 19th Century white Southerners had nothing to regret.
The second essay looks at 20th Century historians claiming that Southern identity was shaped by guilt. As Foster says in another essay, “Most white southerners, even some who lamented the South’s sins, turned to their faith not for judgment but for solace.” [p. 42] Guilt over slavery or betraying their country did not afflict the white South no matter how hard academic historians tried to look for it. Ulrich B. Phillips and his progeny from the Dunning Reconstruction School offered Southern readers “feel-good” accounts of ignorant Africans brought to Jesus (and America) by their masters, provided with food, shelter, and protection by their natural white superiors. Why would they feel guilty over that? The theological consensus in the white Southern community did not question the behaviors of the ruling elite during the Civil War or before it.
The third essay looks at the relationship after the Vietnam War ended to the Lost Cause thesis. A fourth looks at why we describe the war as the Civil War, instead of as the War of the Rebellion.
In the next essay, Foster doubts that most historians are right in claiming that D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was really a homage to the Confederacy. Griffith and the author Thomas Dixon tied the Reconstruction Era Ku Klux Klan to symbols that were not used in the 1860s. Parsons believes that the “Fiery Cross” set alight outside Black people’s homes in the movie was tied not to the Confederacy but to resurgent Protestant nationalism. This “modern” 20th Century history created by Griffith was not to build a new Confederacy based on sectionalism but to reinforce the ties that bound white Protestants against the Catholic, Jew, and Negro threat to racial and religious hegemony. It was to unite bigots both North and South against a common enemy.
The book also has an essay saying that for all the claptrap about the white South’s resistance to Federal power, for most of the first half of the 20th Century, Southern voters wanted the Federal government to do more, not less. White Southerners supported increased Federal intervention. Southern politicians took on national crusades to use the Federal government to outlaw sinful actions like lotteries and girlie books and magazines. Many Southerners supported Prohibition, which involved the Federal government trying to stamp out liquid vice. When Prohibition became part of the Constitution, Southern politicians voted for increased allocations to agencies designed to eradicate the flow of bootleg liquors nationally. Southern whites also supported Federal agencies to regulate agriculture. And, of course, during the Depression, Southerners lined up for Federal aid from Washington. Southern white politicians did not oppose Federal action, unless it was to ban lynchings or other forms of terror against Black voters.
If someone is interested in Civil War memory, this essay collection is not the place to start. However, if you have read David Blight and several other introductions to the field, this may be a good place for further examinations with a long-time expert.
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