I've quoted Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory blog here before. But I wanted to mention it again in particular, because he's blogging on a regular basis about the historical issues that become part of the Lost Cause, pro-Confederate narrative of the war.
Not unlike dealing with Holocaust deniers, the Lost Cause advocates often have a short-term advantage because they are perfectly happy to engage in what's technically called "making s**t up".
Also not unlike Holocaust deniers, Lost Cause advocates use Civil War history as current ideology. They don't really care what actually happened. The Lost Cause/neo-Confederate ideology is not regional nostalgia, though that may be a minor part of its appeal It's a white-supremacist ideology.
Neo-Confederates hate this guy
For those in the reality-based community, both aspects present challenges. A recent post of Kevin's which apparently attracted a lot of attention from Lost Cause trolls, Jacksonian Paternalism in The Extreme, illustrates the problem with their making stuff up. It describes a neo-Confederate writer who reflects the Christian-dominionist religious perspective that often accompanies the Lost Cause faith claiming that Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson really cared about his slaves, as evidenced by his teaching them to read and holding prayer meetings with them.
For people familiar with the Lost Cause scam, the story reeks to high heaven. But unless you're familiar with the prewar biography of Stonewall Jackson, which is not exactly an everyday household topic of conversation and attention, you can't immediately say it's false, if you're trying to be honest about history. My reaction to the factual claims was that it's exceptionally unlikely that Jackson taught his slaves to read, because Southern slave codes strictly forbade such things, and the constant fear of "servile insurrection" all over the South strongly encouraged obeying that law. On the other hand, Jackson has the reputation for having been exceptionally devout in his religious conduct, so it's entirely possible he had prayer meetings with slaves, though it's highly doubtful any of them truly considered them voluntary.
Now, to actually research this, you would have to consult biographies of Jackson and look at what the prewar evidence said about Jackson's conduct. Someone pursuing original research on it would look for letters, testimony from former Jackson slaves, news reports, the Virginia slave codes, etc. Definitely harder than just making stuff up.
Also, because of their ideological/political viewpoint, the neo-Confederates are not interested in discussing the actual history. They would prefer to sidetrack any such discussion into "us white folks shore are better than 'em blacks". Or to various Christian-dominionist culture-war topics.
So engaging Lost Cause types is a particular challenge. Where do you cross the line between, on the one hand, arguing with bad ideas that we know influence a significant number of people and, on the other, of giving them validation they don't deserve by pretending to take their bogus arguments seriously?
Still, anyone writing about the Civil War will have to deal with those ideas in some way or the other. Because the Lost Cause notions of the immediate postwar period became the dominant ideology among Southern whites by the mid-1870s at the latest. And the North-South reconciliation that took place after the war was, in the end, mainly a reconciliation among white people of the North and the South, and the dominant understanding of the war among non-Southerners was influenced more than it ever should have been by the Lost Cause dogmas.
The more realistic viewpoint never went completely away. African-American historians in particular and many white historians that interested themselves in labor history challenged the long-prevalent Lost Cause view all along.
It was the post-Second World War civil rights movement that caused a real paradigm shift among American historians to a viewpoint that recognized the centrality of the slavery issue to the Civil War and the events leading up to it. The Lost Cause version was based on more-or-less taking black Americans out of the picture. Let's call it the expanded democratic consciousness of the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s restored a more complete view of the reality.
The Lost Cause view of the Civil War was an ideological artifact of thesegregation era. Today it's become the ideology of the neo-Confederates.
That doesn't mean that everyone who holds some idea from the Lost Cause canon is a fan of some white-supremacist group. The Lost Cause dogma had a tremendous effect on mainstream history-writing for decades.
It does mean we should recognize the Lost Cause version for the pseudo-history that it is. And how neo-Confederate groups use it as a contemporary, white-supremacist ideology.
Kevin does a good job at his blog of steering around the many pitfalls, quicksand patches, underwater shoals and minefields that come with blogging about Civil War history. Check out his blog if you aren't reading it already.
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