Lost Cause Dogma (Pt. 1 of 2)

I encountered a couple of neo-Confederate type claims this week in an online discussion group in which I participate: the "War Between the States" and the claim that "states rights" was the cause of the Civil War.

The notion that the Civil War was caused by Southerners' devotion to the abstract principle of "states rights", as well as the name "War Between the States", may have been taught as history in much of the South. But it's not history, it's Lost Cause ideology.

For the immediate post-Civil War generation, the Lost Cause ideology, dishonest as it was, at least made some kind of political sense. Former Confederates faced legal disabilities and possible prosecution for treason and various other crimes related to their actions in the rebellion. Plus, slavery had been thoroughly discredited during the war, even among Northerners who may have been indifferent to it before.

And since the postwar Southern conservatives wanted to minimize federal oversight of the South during Reconstruction, an ideology of "states rights" made sense. Including as a device to sanitize their motives in supporting the Confederacy. Today, with every year that passes it becomes more and more abstract ideology divorced from any real concern for history.

For instance, the name "War Between the States" was meant to emphasize the sectional and allegedly states-rights nature of the conflict. Nobody called it that during the war itself.

It's even a mistake to think that the antebellum slaveowners used "states rights" as their main pro-slavery slogan. They did rely heavily on states-rights arguments up until around 1850. But with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law that year, it was Northern states who found themselves being forced by federal laws to help enforce the return of absconding human property to be tortured and re-enslaved in the South. And the advocates of slavery were insistent on this trampling of states rights.

(Cont. in Part 2)