What Was the Lost Cause?

Originally posted at Mindy Esposito’s Substack.

“That’s just the Lost Cause Myth.”

But when I ask someone to tell me what the “Lost Cause Myth” actually was, all I hear is crickets…

Still, I get some version of that sentence hurled as an accusation all the time. Sometimes it lands on me. Sometimes I watch it thrown at someone else. Say something fair about Robert E. Lee and it is Lost Cause. Question something you were taught about the War Between the States and it is Lost Cause. Suggest that 750,000 Confederate soldiers were fighting because Union troops invaded and it is Lost Cause.

The phrase has become a period at the end of an argument, as if saying it settles anything at all.

But what was the Lost Cause, actually? That is what I want to look at here. And before we do, we have to leave the twenty-first century behind for a little while. That is not easy. We know things they did not know. We live in a different country now, inside a different culture, with more than a century and a half of history standing between their world and ours.

Nowhere does that matter more than when we talk about race.

So let me say where I stand. Black people are equal to White people, and equal to every other race. Period. But most White Americans in the nineteenth century believed otherwise, and that was not a Southern belief. It was an American one, North and South alike.

Abraham Lincoln said it himself. During his debate with Stephen Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois, on August 21, 1858, Lincoln said there was “a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality.”¹ He went further still, telling that crowd he favored “the race to which I belong having the superior position.”² A month later at Charleston he said he was not, nor had ever been, in favor of “bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”³

Those are Lincoln’s words, not mine. And history gets complicated here, because at that same Ottawa debate Lincoln also said a Black man had the same natural right to the bread earned by his own hand as any man living.⁴ How does a man hold both of those positions at once? Because he was a nineteenth century American. And if we want to understand history rather than simply judge it, we have to understand the world these people actually lived in, not the one we wish they had. That goes for Northerners. It goes for Southerners. And it goes for the men who wrote what later became known as the Lost Cause.

So let’s look at what they actually said.

WHERE THE LOST CAUSE CAME FROM

The name is not something modern historians invented to insult Southerners. In 1866, Edward A. Pollard, former editor of the Richmond Examiner, published a book titled The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates.⁵ There it is. 1866. The Lost Cause.

In the years after, former Confederates and Southern writers, among them Jubal Early, Alexander H. Stephens, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Robert Lewis Dabney, D. H. Hill, Jefferson Davis, and J. William Jones, wrote their own accounts of what had happened and why. The Southern Historical Society became one of the great vehicles for preserving and publishing that work.

But there was no Lost Cause bible. Nobody called a meeting, passed eleven resolutions, and declared this to be its meaning. These men disagreed with each other, sometimes bitterly. What we now call the Lost Cause is really a collection of arguments pulled from their books, memoirs, speeches, and organizations. So instead of throwing the label around, let’s take the arguments one at a time.

WHAT THE LOST CAUSE ACTUALLY SAID

Secession was constitutional. This was foundational to the whole argument. Alexander Stephens described the Constitution as “a compact between Sovereign States.”⁶ If the states remained sovereign parties to that compact, the reasoning followed that they retained the right to leave it.

The Confederacy fought a war for independence. Jubal Early certainly believed it. Look at the title he gave his 1866 memoir: A Memoir of the Last Year of the War for Independence in the Confederate States of America.⁷ That is how Early understood the war he had just fought.

Slavery was part of the sectional crisis, but it did not explain everything that happened. This is where things get interesting, because Stephens, endlessly quoted today for his 1861 Cornerstone Speech, wrote after the war that “the matter of Slavery, so called, was the proximate cause” of the collision between North and South.⁸ He did not pretend slavery had nothing to do with it. But he also wrote that the question of state sovereignty was, to the Southern states, of “infinitely more importance” than slavery itself.⁹ You do not have to agree with Stephens. But if we are going to tell people what Stephens believed, we ought to let Stephens tell us.

The average Confederate soldier was not fighting to preserve slavery. Lost Cause writers drew a line between why states seceded and why individual men enlisted, and those are not necessarily the same historical question. Why did Mississippi secede? Why did Virginia? Why did an eighteen year old farm boy pick up a rifle? Those questions can have different answers, and the sources for each are different sources.

Some Lost Cause writers defended slavery outright. They did, and there is no need to dance around it. Early described the slave system after the war and called slaves a class of laborers who were “happy and contented.”¹⁰ I do not accept that on Early’s word alone. We have testimony from slaves themselves. We have runaway advertisements, court records, plantation ledgers, letters, and diaries by the thousands. We weigh Early’s claim against that evidence. That is how history works.

Confederate soldiers had fought honorably. Losing did not, in these writers’ minds, make the Confederate soldier dishonorable. They believed their dead deserved to be buried, remembered, and honored. Southern women organized cemeteries. Families raised markers. Veterans wrote down what they remembered. Communities set aside Memorial Days. That became an enormous part of postwar Southern memory, and it is not hard to understand why.

The Confederacy was overwhelmed, not simply outfought. This was one of Early’s central claims. In 1872 he said that “General Lee had not been conquered in battle, but surrendered because he had no longer an army with which to give battle,”¹¹ describing what remained of Lee’s command at Appomattox as “the skeleton, the mere ghost of the Army of Northern Virginia.”¹² Early pointed to Northern manpower, industry, railroads, and supply. Here is where I part ways with anyone who simply calls this a myth. We can count people. We can count factories and miles of track. We can examine what was left of Lee’s army in April of 1865. Maybe Early read those facts correctly. Maybe he did not. But “Lost Cause Myth” is not evidence either way.

Robert E. Lee was an exceptional commander. Lee became the great military figure of the Lost Cause, with Stonewall Jackson raised up beside him. Whether Lee deserves that standing is not a question a label can answer. Look at his campaigns. Look at his victories and his defeats. Make the case on the record.

Lee was not primarily responsible for Gettysburg. And here is where I think the Lost Cause writers did real damage. Early became one of Lee’s fiercest defenders and increasingly laid the blame for Gettysburg on James Longstreet. Longstreet’s reputation suffered for a century because of it. This is a place where we can set the Lost Cause narrative beside the military record and ask whether Early was being fair to Longstreet. I do not think Early should be protected from that evidence, and I do not think Longstreet should either be denied it.

Winning the war did not settle the constitutional question. The United States Army could defeat Confederate armies and destroy the Confederate government. It could make Southern independence impossible. But Lost Cause writers argued that military victory did not travel backward through time and determine whether secession had been constitutional in 1861. Agree or disagree, but that is a constitutional argument. “Your army lost” is not one.

Reconstruction was oppressive and destructive. Lost Cause writers wrote with real hostility about military occupation, disenfranchisement, and the corruption that followed the war, and some of those accounts were undoubtedly shaded by their own anger and their own racial views. So investigate them. Were particular governments corrupt? Look at the records. Were former Confederates disenfranchised? Look at the laws. Was the South under military government? Read the Reconstruction Acts. The evidence gets the final word here too.

The Confederate dead deserved to be remembered. This may be the simplest part of the whole thing. They lost people they loved. Fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, neighbors. They buried them and mourned them, raised monuments to them, wrote down their names, and told their children who they were. You can disagree entirely with the Confederacy and still understand why they did that.

SO WHAT IS THE “LOST CAUSE MYTH”?

Now we can finally answer the question, because some of it really was romanticized.

But most claims are not myths simply because a Lost Cause writer made them. The North had vastly greater industrial capacity. True or false? Measure it. The North had greater manpower. Count it. Confederate soldiers enlisted mainly to defend their homes, families, and communities. Read their letters and diaries. Lee was a good commander. Examine his record. Reconstruction involved corruption in places. Show me where, show me who, show me the records. Secession was constitutional. Make the constitutional argument and answer it on its own terms.

This is what bothers me about how “Lost Cause Myth” gets used today. It has become a conversation stopper. Say the words and apparently nothing more is required. I do not accept that. If something I say is a Lost Cause myth, tell me which part. Who made the claim, and what exactly did he say? Most importantly, what does the primary evidence say? Maybe the Lost Cause writer was wrong. Maybe he was right. Maybe, as so often happens in history, the truth sits somewhere in between. We do not find out by attaching a label to it. We find out by doing the work.

So there you have it. Setting aside the antiquated racial views these men carried, and I have not set them aside here, I think the Lost Cause narrative holds up as a reasonable reading of the evidence far more often than it is given credit for.

But researching my new book, The River Speaks, has pushed me somewhere the Lost Cause writers themselves never quite went. I have spent many months now in the primary sources on the river war, the Trans-Mississippi, and the disconnect between Richmond and the western theater, and I have come to believe there is more to the story of Confederate defeat than even Early or Pollard or Stephens accounted for in their own histories. What that is, I will lay out in full when the book publishes next month.

Don’t take my word for it. Read the documents.

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NOTES

1. Abraham Lincoln, remarks at the first Lincoln-Douglas debate, Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 3 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953).

2. Ibid.

3. Abraham Lincoln, remarks at the fourth Lincoln-Douglas debate, Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858, in Basler, Collected Works, vol. 3.

4. Lincoln, Ottawa debate, August 21, 1858, in Basler, Collected Works, vol. 3.

5. Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (New York: E. B. Treat, 1866).

6. Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1868).

7. Jubal A. Early, A Memoir of the Last Year of the War for Independence in the Confederate States of America (Lynchburg, VA: Charles W. Button, 1867).

8. Stephens, A Constitutional View, vol. 1.

9. Ibid.

10. Jubal A. Early, address delivered at Washington and Lee University, 1872, in Southern Historical Society Papers.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

Mindy Esposito

Mindy Esposito is an independent scholar in Tennessee.

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