I recently came cross this column at the History News Network that gives a good brief summary of what the Lost Cause ideology of the segreagated South was all about: How the Myth of the Lost Cause Tripped Up Trent Lott by Robert Bonner History News Network 12/30/02.
Former Confederates were among the first to evoke a politically useful past in adjusting to their defeat by the United States. A Richmond journalist, Edward Pollard, coined the term "The Lost Cause" in 1866, and he soon used this evocative label to distance the white South from secession and slavery. In the 1868 presidential campaign, Pollard insisted that rebellion and black servitude had only been means to the Confederacy's real aims of limiting the federal government and guaranteeing white supremacy.
Praise for Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, offered by Lott, as well as the cabinet members John Ashworth and Gail Norton, demonstrates the success of Lost Cause mythology in removing the stain of treason from the Confederate legacy. Within a generation, the gray ghosts of a mythic southern past became the glorious, whitewashed heroes. By the end of the nineteenth century, these Confederate leaders came to be associated less with what they actually did than with the courage and character they had mythically displayed by standing up for their convictions and resolutely paying the price.
This mythology of the Lost Cause remains even today an important factor in the ideology of far-right extremists and Republican Party race-baiters. Joe Conason in Big Lies (2003) described this phenomenon:
The Civil War, [like the American Revolution], was a struggle between left and right. Today's rightists still cherish Dixie, as if the barbarous cruelty and feudal cuture of the Old South represented a lost Eden. Academics will argue forever about the Civil War's economic and social origins, but it was undeniably liberals such as William Lloyd Garrison and Horace Greeley who sought to abolish slavery and preserve the Union. The conservatives who sought to dissolve the Union wanted to preserve and extend slvary; not only did theytryto ruin the nation before it was a century old, but they turned to the throne of England for assistance. When Lincoln was President, the Union properly indicted the Confederate leaders and their northern supporters as traitors (an epithet now generally avoided out of concern for delicate southern sensibilities).
Amazingly, there remains a strong emotional reverence for the symbols of the Confederacy, not only among the Klan, the Aryan Brotherhood, and skinhead Nazis, but among certain Republican politicians and intellectuals as well. They nurture a politcal cult of neo-Confederates, diehard defenders of secession and states' rights. Aside from romanticizing the Old South, neo-Confederates tend to advocate a regional brand of conservatism that is chauvinistic, hostile to immigrants, and often blatantly bigoted against blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and Asians.
Like Strom Thurmond and his followers, who abandoned the Democratic Party in 1948, during the early struggle over civil rights, the neo-Confederates are Republicans now. The GOP reciprocates this support by pretending not to notice their Dixie [Confederate] flags, their racial obsessions, and their scurrilous attitude toward Lincoln. The loyalties of the neo-Confederates are uncertain. According to Clyde Wilson, a leading neo-Confederate ideologue and professor at the University of South Carolina, these devotees of Dixie should feel no loyalty to the United States at all.
Alan Nolan characterizes the Lost Cause as follows in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (2000):
... [T]he Lost Cause was expressly a rationalization, a cover-up. It is, therefore, distinctly marked by Southern advocacy. As point out by Michael C. C. Adams in Our Masters the Rebels, long before the secession crisis, Southerners "came to see themselves as representing a minority within the nation." One reason for this was "the need to justify the existence of slavery ... even before the abolitionist attack from the North, Southerners began the defense of slavery as a social system that provided unique benefits, both for the slaves whom it placed under the fatherly care fo a superior race and for the masterwho was given the freedom from toil necessary to the creation of a superior culture." In short, Southerners were placed in a defensive posture before the war, and this has never changed.
The advocacy aspect of the southern legend has been express on the part of Southern spokesmen. On the back page of the April 1880 issue of the Southern Historical Society Papers, as well as in other issues, the following advertisement for subscriptions appears above the name of Rev. J. William Jones, D.D., secretary of the Southern Historical Society of Richmond, Virginia: "[The contents] will make our Papers interesting to all lovers of historic truth and simply INVALUABLE to those who desire to see vindicated the name and fame of those who made our great struggle for constitutional freedom." Writing whose purpose is to "vindicate" the "name and fame" of the South's "great struggle" plainly proceeds from an advocacy premise.
No comments:
Post a Comment