The Lost Cause
The Burial of Latané – Lost Cause
Caroline E. Janney
Encyclopedia Virginia: Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 9 May. (2011)
Abstract
The Lost Cause is an interpretation of the American Civil War (1861–1865) that seeks to present the war, from the perspective of Confederates, in the best possible terms. Developed by white Southerners, many of them former Confederate generals, in a postwar climate of economic, racial, and gender uncertainty, the Lost Cause created and romanticized the “Old South” and the Confederate war effort, often distorting history in the process. For this reason, many historians have labeled the Lost Cause a myth or a legend. It is certainly an important example of public memory, one in which nostalgia for the Confederate past is accompanied by a collective forgetting of the horrors of slavery. 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. The Lost Cause has lost much of its academic support but continues to be an important part of how the Civil War is commemorated in the South and remembered in American popular culture.
Six Tenets
The Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War typically includes the following six assertions:
- Secession, not slavery, caused the Civil War.
- African Americans were “faithful slaves,” loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom.
- The Confederacy was defeated militarily only because of the Union’s overwhelming advantages in men and resources.
- Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly.
- The most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee.
- Southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones.
The historical consensus, however, presents a picture that is far more complicated, one in which some tenets of the Lost Cause are obviously false and some are at least partly true.
Click here to read this article from Encyclopedia Virginia
