Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 7: the Lost Cause narrative defined

I quoted in the April 6 post a Substack Civil War Memory column by Kevin Levin, who is also the author of Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth (2019).

Here I want to share a passage from Kevin's book that gives an excellent concise summary of what the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate historical narrative is:

The goals of removing [the post-Civil War] federal occupiers, limiting the freedoms of the formerly enslaved, and reestablishing white supremacy necessitated a need to explain and justify the cause and sacrifice that had led to Confederate defeat and emancipation [of the slaves] in the first place. This reframing of the war and its outcome began almost immediately after the war with the establishment of cemeteries in communities across the former Confederacy, where the fallen could be honored. But it soon blossomed into a full-blown reinterpretation of the war. Although there was never anything close to an official handbook, what eventually became known as the Lost Cause narrative of the war quickly coalesced around a set of assumptions about the war, including its causes and consequences. Among other things, Lost Cause writers insisted that the overwhelming resources of the North brought about defeat on the battlefield and not the failure of the South’s generals or the wavering of support among the enlisted soldiers and broader populace. They also celebrated Generals Lee and Jackson and all Confederate soldiers as embodying the highest virtues of bravery, sacrifice, and Christian morality.

Lost Cause writers asserted with the same confidence, as white Southerners had for decades, that slavery was a “positive good,” benefiting the black race and serving as the foundation of a peaceful society before the war, as opposed to a violent and immigrant-ridden industrial North. In contrast with Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, who spoke for many when he declared in 1861 that slavery constituted the “cornerstone” of their new government, Lost Cause writers now insisted that the Southern states seceded in defense of states’ rights. Most importantly, they argued that African Americans showed unwavering support for the Confederacy on the home front and in their various capacities with the army through the very end. [my emphasis]

This was a highly ideological narrative that not only falsified the real history but served as a justification for depriving Black citizens of their rights, often including their right to live, during the long Jim Crow period with its segregation, voter suppression, and election subversion.

The Lost Cause narrative was not exactly a stab-in-the-back theory of the loss of the war to preserve slavery. But it was very much a narrative in which white Southerners were the real victims. As Kevin writes, this narrative included an "emphasis on a peaceful and pastoral Old South destroyed by invading Yankees and occupied by corrupt North- ern 'carpetbaggers' who remained ignorant of the true relationship between master and slave."