Restricted Agree to define "Lost Cause"

byron ed

2nd Lieutenant
Joined
Mar 22, 2017
Location
Midwest
Have we all along been assuming that there's concurrence on what Lost Cause is? Let's find out. Here below is an outline based on dozens of discussions about Lost Cause in this forum. It's a living document not a credo -- simply advise if in your view something is not correct, or is missing, or should be missing, or what should be worded another way. We'll re-write it when we achieve concurrence.

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The “Lost Cause

- Term first appears in 1866 in Southern historian Edward A Pollard’s The Lost Cause: A new Southern History of the War of the Confederates.

- Writings by Jubal A. Early for the Southern Historical Society in the 1870s push the “Lost Cause” mentality as a cultural phenomenon.

- Historian Jason Phillips posed that the Confederate “culture of invincibility” evolved into the “Lost Cause,” whereby former Confederates used religious overtones to justify their defeat and eventual redemption.

Major Precepts of the Movement

- Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson represented white Southern nobility, contrasting that to Northern generals of lower moral standards; who subjected Southerners to horrific evils (Grant and Sherman are key targets).

- Confederate losses on the battlefield were inevitable due to Northern superiority in resources and manpower, advantaged by Industrialization and European refugee immigrants taken advantage of.

- Confederate losses can also be attributed to the betrayal or lack of conviction on the part of some of General Lee’s reports, in particular Gen. James Longstreet (per former Lt. Gen. Early).

- Defense of “states’ rights” was the primary catalyst that led Southerners to secede from the Union, meaning that preservation and expansion of slavery was never a main tenant of the Confederacy.

- Slavery was a benign institution, meaning slaves were for the most part loyal and faithful to their benevolent masters.

Relevance

- The movement was created in part for Southerners to cope with the dramatic political, social and economic changes that came after the war.

- The movement empowered white Southern animosity towards anything Northern, and provided the genesis for an alternate Reconstruction story, whereby groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were ennobled and empowered.

- The movement has been very effectively carried into the twentieth century by the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

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