As the Anti-Defamation League notes: “While a number of non-extremists still use the flag as a symbol of Southern heritage or pride, there is growing recognition, especially outside the South, that the symbol is offensive to many Americans.”. Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the U.S. Confederate States presidential election of 1861, Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo, Heroic theory of invention and scientific development, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy&oldid=1006356230, Cultural history of the American Civil War, Riots and civil disorder in South Carolina, Riots and civil disorder during the Reconstruction Era, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from June 2018, Articles with incomplete citations from January 2021, Articles with unsourced statements from June 2019, Articles with incomplete citations from December 2018, Articles with unsourced statements from September 2018, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from July 2019, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Though the idea of the Lost Cause has more than one origin, its proponents mainly argue that slavery was not the primary cause of the Civil War. While Longstreet was the most common target of such attacks, others came under fire as well. The notion was used to perpetuate racism and racist power structures during the Jim Crow era in the American South. The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, or simply the Lost Cause, is an American pseudo-historical,[1] negationist ideology that advocates the belief that the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was a just and heroic one. [91], The novel, which "blazes with oratorial fireworks",[91] "attracted attention as soon as it came from the press", and more than 100,000 copies were quickly sold. It was a landscape dotted with figures drawn mainly out of the past: the chivalric planter; the magnolia-scented Southern belle; the good, gray Confederate veteran, once a knight of the field and saddle; and obliging old Uncle Remus. The North was not attacking the South out of a pure, though misguided motive: to end slavery. Dissertation), University of Missouri—Columbia, 2011. Dissertation), University of Missouri–Columbia, 2011, Elna C. Green, "Protecting confederate soldiers and mothers: Pensions, gender, and the welfare state in the US south, a case study from Florida.". This was replaced again in 2003 with a flag resembling the Stars and Bars. The pensions were designed to honor the Lost Cause and reduce the severe poverty which was prevalent in the region. He identified a typical image in postwar fiction: a materialistic, rich Yankee man marrying an impoverished spiritual Southern bride as a symbol of happy national reunion. Much was left out of the Lost Cause: [N]either the trauma of slavery for African Americans nor their heroic, heartbreaking freedom struggle found a place in that story. Its motives were economic and venal. Female applicants for pensions were rejected if their moral reputations were in question. It portrayed slavery as more benevolent than cruel, alleging that it taught Christianity and "civilization". Woodworth concluded that the film through "judicial omission" presents "a distorted view of the Civil War". [54]:68 According to historian and Dixon biographer Richard Allen Cook, "the Negro, according to Dixon, is a brute, not a citizen: a child of a degenerate race brought from Africa. We never overwhelmed the South.... What we won from the South we won by hard fighting." Its similarity to the US flag made it unpopular with some Confederates. [23][24] The institutions have lasted to the present and descendants of Southern soldiers continue to attend their meetings. Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans centered on whether or not the state of Texas could deny a request by the SCV for vanity license plates that incorporated a Confederate battle flag. They perpetuated the ideals of the Old South and brought a sense of comfort to the New.[15]. The University of Virginia professor Gary W. Gallagher wrote: The architects of the Lost Cause acted from various motives. Slavery was not only a benign institution but a "positive good". [80], The UDC was quite prominent but not at all unique in its appeal to upscale white Southern women. Comparable men, on the other hand, were much less interested in belonging to historical organizations, instead, they devoted themselves to secret fraternal societies and emphasized athletic, political, and financial exploits in order to prove their manhood. Instead, the Confederates are nobly fighting for, rather than against, freedom, as viewers are reminded again and again by one white southern character after another. [62], The Confederate States used several flags during its existence from 1861 to 1865. Memories of the bloody, unbearable realities of war. [103][104] One critic said, "Like other similar films of the period also dealing with the antebellum South, the slaves in the film are all good-natured, subservient, annoyingly cheerful, content and always willing to help a white person in need with some valuable life lesson along the way. Race Questions Vigorously Discussed by Thomas Dixon, Jr., in, "When Bigotry Paraded Through the Streets", "Were Scots responsible for the Ku Klux Klan? "I’m proud to be here with this flag.". For most white Southerners, the Lost Cause evolved into a language of vindication and renewal, as well as an array of practices and public monuments through which they could solidify both their Southern pride and their Americanness. Photographs of the shooter, an avowed white supremacist, showed him posing with the flag. "[120] The historian David Blight said that "its use of white supremacy as both means and ends" has been a key characteristic of the Lost Cause. (The first KKK did not burn crosses, which was originally a Scottish tradition, "Crann Tara", designed to gather clans for war. "Mr. Dixon's purpose here is to show that the original formers of the Ku Klux Klan were modern knights errant, taking the only means at hand to right wrongs. Writing in the Journal of American History, the historian Steven E. Woodworth derided the movie as a modern day telling of Lost Cause mythology. Gods and Generals reportedly lionizes Jackson and Lee. They staged the contest between Reconstruction opponent and Democratic candidate Wade Hampton and incumbent Governor Daniel H. Chamberlain as a religious struggle between good and evil and called for "redemption". [17] He promoted many of the aforementioned themes of the Lost Cause. There is a common misconception that the story takes place in the antebellum period, and that the African-American characters are slaves. In June 2020 during the George Floyd protests for racial justice, calls mounted to remove various Confederate symbols (including statues) from public displays. Through activities such as the construction of prominent Confederate monuments and the writing of school history textbooks, the Lost Cause movement sought to ensure future generations of Southern whites would know about the South's "true" reasons for fighting the war, and therefore continue to support white supremacist policies, such as Jim Crow laws. Melody Kubassek, "Ask Us Not to Forget: The Lost Cause in Natchez, Mississippi". Perhaps the need for the country to stay together made it necessary for the North to sit silently and accept the South's conception of the conflict. Confederate soldiers were often outnumbered, ragged, and hungry; southern civilians did endure much material deprivation and a disproportionate amount of bereavement; U.S. forces did wreck [sic] havoc on southern infrastructure and private property and the like, yet whenever these points appear in films Gallagher considers them motifs "celebratory" of the Confederacy (p. [66] On June 18, 2015, the Supreme Court, in a 5–4 vote, held that Texas was entitled to reject the SCV proposal.[66]. In October 2015, outrage erupted online following the discovery of a Texan school's geography textbook, which described slaves as "immigrants" and "workers". We have had national peace since the war ended, and we will always have it, and I think the way Lee and his soldiers conducted themselves in the hours of surrender has a great deal to do with it. Afterward, Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard adopted Miles’s flag as a battle flag for his troops. Growing up in Alabama, you would think Dale's number 3 bumper sticker and the rebel flag were bffs. The things that were done during the Civil War have not been forgotten, of course, but we now see them through a veil. In 1961, South Carolina began to fly the Confederate flag over its state house. [107] The film critic Roger Ebert described the movie as "a Civil War movie that Trent Lott might enjoy" and said of its Lost Cause themes, "If World War II were handled this way, there'd be hell to pay. They also wanted to provide their children and future generations of white Southerners with a 'correct' narrative of the war.[3]. In 1894, the state of Mississippi adopted a flag using the Confederate battle flag as its canton, with blue, white, and red horizontal stripes. Hillyer states that the Confederate Memorial Literary Society (CMLS), founded by elite white women in Richmond, Virginia, in the 1890s, exemplifies that solution. modifier - modifier le code - modifier Wikidata John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum (25 mars 1867 – 6 mars 1941) est un artiste et sculpteur américain qui devint mondialement célèbre pour son œuvre du mont Rushmore qui représente quatre grands présidents américains. [98], The Confederate Veteran, a monthly magazine published in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1893 to 1932, made its publisher, Sumner Archibald Cunningham, a leader of the Lost Cause movement.[99]. It has sealed in popular imaginations a fascinated nostalgia for the glamorous southern plantation house and ordered hierarchical society in which slaves are 'family,' and there is a mystical bond between the landowner and the rich soil those slaves work for him. That was exemplified in "Force or Consent as the Basis of American Government" by Mary Scrugham in which she presented frivolous arguments against the legality of Lincoln's presidency. There Rowdy sees the picture of … They fought for what they knew was right. The above article is from Salon.com. [45]:510, Dixon predicted a "race war" if current trends continued unchecked that he believed white people would surely win, having "3,000 years of civilization in their favor". The United Daughters of the Confederacy issued a statement at the time opposing use of the flag “in certain demonstrations of college groups and some political groups.”. Nebraska. 328 N Arthur Ashe Boulevard, Richmond, VA 23220. By the mid-eighties, most southerners had decided to build a future within a reunited nation. "[54]:72 Martial law is declared, US troops are sent in, as they were during Reconstruction. Longstreet was widely disparaged by Southern veterans because of his postwar cooperation with US President Ulysses S. Grant with whom he had shared a close friendship before the war and for joining the Republican Party. Stampp, The Causes of the Civil War, page 59, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Jackson, Mississippi, monument to Confederate soldiers, The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, Removal of Confederate monuments and memorials, List of Confederate monuments and memorials, Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, Daughters of the Founders and Patriots of America, Giving the vote to the newly freed slaves, he made his position on slavery ambiguous, "The Confederacy Was Built on Slavery. [105] It was released on VHS in the UK several times, most recently in 2000. Hillary Clinton and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) Bill Clinton sent three letters of congratulations to the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), the first of them in slightly less than a year after Carol Moseley-Braun's victory over the UDC in the U.S. Senate. Dixon's narrative was so readily adopted that the film has been credited with the revival of the Klan in the 1910s and 1920s. In the world of Gods and Generals, slavery has nothing to do with the Confederate cause. From his studio in Rome, where a Confederate flag hung proudly, he created a series of statues of Confederate "heroes" which both celebrated the Lost Cause in which he was a "true believer",[38] and set a highly visible model for Confederate monument-erecting in the early 20th century. He bought a "steam yacht" and named it Dixie.[49]. He had an immense following, and "his name had become a household word. Lee's tactical brilliance at Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville took on legendary status, and despite his accepting full responsibility for the defeat at Gettysburg, Lee remained largely infallible for Southerners and was spared criticism even from historians until recent times." "[54]:68 Dixon expounded the views in The Times of Philadelphia while he discussed the novel in 1902: "The negro is a human donkey. "It is emphatically a man's book," said Dixon to The Times. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, "White Women and the Politics of Historical Memory in the New South, 1880–1920." substancial - Free ebook download as Text File (.txt), PDF File (.pdf) or read book online for free. In my boyhood I witnessed the savagery of the Slavery agitation – in my youth I felt the fierceness of the hatred directed against all those who stood by the Nation. Two years later, a vertical red stripe was added to the Confederate national flag, but this flag was short lived, as the Confederacy surrendered only a month later. 14. He also stated that names such as the War of Northern Aggression and the War Between the States, the expression which was coined by Alexander Stephens, were just attempts to deny the fact that the American Civil War was an actual civil war. He summed up his reasons for disliking the movie: Gods and Generals brings to the big screen the major themes of Lost Cause mythology that professional historians have been working for half a century to combat. Women, however, developed a much different approach to the cause by emphasizing female activism, initiative, and leadership. They used the Lost Cause to warn Southerners of their decline from past virtue, to promote moral reform, to encourage conversion to Christianity, and to educate the young in Southern traditions; in the fullness of time, they related to American values. Source: Associated Press Deepti Hajela, Associated Press Updated 11:04 am CDT, Saturday, June 29, 2019 NEW YORK (AP) — When Wilhelmena Rhodes Kelly hit a roadblock while researching her family history, a chance encounter at a conference with members of the Daughters of the American Revolution got her the help she needed to keep going. Oregon Society. Pure revisionism and whitewashing. One is of the "faithful slave"; the other is what. Reluctantly, Klansmen—white men—had to take the law into their own hands in order to save Southern white womanhood from the sexual brutality of black men. One of the ideas the reconciliationist Lost Cause instilled deeply into the national culture is that even when Americans lose, they win. [76] The UDC was especially influential across the South in the early 20th century, where its main role was to preserve and uphold the memory of Confederate veterans, especially the husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers who died in the war. The term Lost Cause first appeared in the title of an 1866 book by the Virginian author and journalist Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. Hudson Strode wrote a widely-read scholarly three-volume biography of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The Yale historian David W. Blight wrote: The Lost Cause became an integral part of national reconciliation by dint of sheer sentimentalism, by political argument, and by recurrent celebrations and rituals. Webmaster (804) 355-1636. Stories of happy slaves were often used as propaganda in an effort to defend slavery; the United Daughters of the Confederacy had a "Faithful Slave Memorial Committee" and erected the Heyward Shepherd monument in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. He wrote that Gallagher, ... concedes that "Lost Cause themes" (with the important exception of minimizing the importance of slavery) are based on historical truths (p. 46). They felt that the Confederacy's defeat in the war was God's punishment for their sins and motivated by this belief, they increasingly turned to religion as their source of solace. He moved from his old house, the ,,Haus zur Hinterpfann", to a new one, Green Shield, when he started making more money. The Avalon Project, “Confederate States of America - A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the … In particular, he dismissed the role of slavery in starting the war and understates the cruelty of American slavery, even promoting it as a way of improving the lives of Africans: We shall not enter upon the discussion of the moral question of slavery. There were numerous causes for secession, but preservation and expansion of slavery was easily the most important of them. Another prominent and influential popularizer of the Lost Cause perspective was D. W. Griffith's highly-successful The Birth of a Nation (1915), which was based on Dixon's novel. See the word that rose 668,840% in searches due to topics in the news. Southerners were portrayed as noble, heroic figures, living in a doomed romantic society that rejected the realistic advice offered by the Rhett Butler character and never understood the risk that they were taking in going to war. To legitimize the Confederacy's rebellion, Lost Cause intellectuals challenged the legitimacy of the federal government and the actions of Abraham Lincoln as US President. [106], The historian William B. Feis similarly criticized the director's decision "to champion the more simplistic-and sanitized-interpretations found in post-war "Lost Cause" mythology". [122], The historian A. Exculpatory myth concerning Confederate war aims and defeat in the American Civil War, "Lost Cause" redirects here. It casts that attempt as faced with "overwhelming Northern aggression". Coski p. 193. [72], Among writers on the Lost Cause, gender roles were a contested domain. A firm believer not only in white supremacy, but also in the "degeneration" of blacks after slavery ended, Dixon thought the ideal solution to America's racial problems was to deport all blacks to Africa. Early in the 1870s for the Southern Historical Society that firmly established the Lost Cause as a long-lasting literary and cultural phenomenon. The article speaks of a specific UDC member named Milly. Written out too were the competing memories and identities that set white southerners one against another, pitting the planters against the up-country, Unionists against Confederates, Populists and mill workers against the corporations, home-front women against war-besotted, broken men.[37]. ... 1859, valuable statistics, &c., &c., &c., together with a history of the Southern Confederacy. Grant, in rejecting the Lost Cause arguments, said in an 1878 interview that he rejected the notion that the South had simply been overwhelmed by numbers. Powell's is an independent bookstore based in Portland, Oregon. The accusations, though thoroughly refuted, gave rise to the belief that the North initiated the Civil War, making a designation of "The War of Northern Aggression" possible as one of the names of the American Civil War. In fact, however, Lee never expressed dissatisfaction with the second-day actions of his "Old War Horse". [50]:389[51]:18 "Each of his trilogy novels had developed that black-and-white battle through rape/lynching scenarios that are always represented as prefiguring total racewar, should elite white men fail to resolve the nation's 'Negro Problem'. The novel aimed to reinforce the superiority of the "Anglo-Saxon" race and advocate either for white dominance of black people or for the separation of the two races. The Louisiana State University history professor Gaines Foster wrote in 2013: Scholars have reached a fair amount of agreement about the role the Lost Cause played in those years, although the scholarship on the Lost Cause, like the memory itself, remains contested. [28] He quotes Foster, who wrote that "signs of respect from former foes and northern publishers made acceptance of reunion easier. The Virginian Moses Jacob Ezekiel, the most prominent Confederate expatriate, was the only sculptor to have seen action during the Civil War. Bill Clinton sent three letters of congratulations to the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), the first of them in slightly less than a year after Carol Moseley-Braun's victory over the UDC in the U.S. Senate. Try skimming over the next two pages as well. Professor Gallagher contended that Douglas Southall Freeman's definitive four-volume biography of Lee, published in 1934, "cemented in American letters an interpretation of Lee very close to Early's utterly heroic figure". Surely it is time to start again in our understanding of this decisive element of our past and to do so from the premises of history unadulterated by the distortions, falsehoods, and romantic sentimentality of the Myth of the Lost Cause. Thus the Confederate Museum both critiqued and eased the economic transformations of the New South and enabled Richmond to reconcile its memory of the past with its hopes for the future and to leave the past behind as it developed new industrial and financial roles.[36]. Memories of how, under slavery, power bred cruelty. Islamic State militants massacred the people of her village, executing men who refused to convert to Islam and women too old to become sex slaves. [8] In reaching that conclusion, they ignore the declarations of secession by the Confederate states, the declarations of congressmen who left the US Congress to join the Confederacy, and the treatment of slavery in the Confederate Constitution. While the Confederacy used three different flags, the flag most commonly called the Confederate flag was its battle flag. The Lost Cause theme has also evolved into a major element in defining gender roles in the white South, in terms of preserving family honor and chivalrous traditions. "[38] His Confederate statues included: Kali Holloway, Director of the Make It Right Project, devoted to the removal of Confederate monuments, points out the influence of Ezekiel: What stands out most is the lasting impact of Ezekiel's tributes to the Confederacy—his homage to 'Stonewall' Jackson in West Virginia; his 'loyal slave' monument in Arlington; his personification of Virginia mourning for her soldiers who died fighting for a treasonous nation created in defense of black chattel slavery. The Confederate flag is also called the rebel flag, as Unionists sometimes called Confederates “rebels,” or the Dixie flag, with Dixie a historic nickname for the South. It is a part of American legend, a part of American history, a part, if you will, of American romance. [53] He was commonly referred to as the best lecturer in the country. "[30], Providing a sense of relief to white Southerners who feared being dishonored by defeat, the Lost Cause was largely accepted in the years following the war by white Americans who found it to be a useful tool in reconciling North and South.[31]. goodnight.