The Myth of the Lost Cause

- Edward H. Bonekemper

“I'm saying very plainly that the Yankees are better equipped than we. They've got factories, shipyards, coalmines... and a fleet to bottle up our harbors and starve us to death. All we've got is cotton, and slaves and... arrogance.”

-Rhett Butler, Gone With The Wind

The Confederate States of America lost the American Civil War. This is inarguable. What is also inarguable, unfortunately, is that the CSA won the post-war propaganda battle. The truth behind the war’s origins, development and ultimate endgame was obscured behind a web of myth and legend, sometimes exaggerated and sometimes outright lies, that concealed the truth in a bid to make the losers look like moral victors. This is unsurprising - losers throughout history have compiled myths to explain their defeat and future resurrection - but what is surprising is just how thoroughly the myth of the lost cause took root. The North came to believe much of what it was being told, just as much as the South. It played a major role in America’s failure to come to terms with the legacy of racial oppression, and the subsequent failure to put the past firmly in the past. Indeed, the myth is so widespread that people who really should have known better - such as a number of history writers - came to believe it. It is only recently, relatively speaking, that the myth has been openly challenged outside academia.

The myth has a somewhat complex origin. First, the defeated leaders a chance to write their memoirs and shape the early discussion of the war between the states (and also cover up the fact they explicitly seceded to protect slavery). Second, the South was treated very poorly in the aftermath of the Civil War, and took comfort in a legend that insisted they had been treated unfairly. Third, as the war and its major players receded into history, it became easier to talk up the romantic ideal of the Civil War and obscure the utterly unromantic truth behind the myth. It is perhaps unsurprising, in this case, that the myth lingered as long as it did. In many places, it still holds strong.

Bonekemper, a noted historian of the American Civil War, has set out to write an assessment of the Lost Cause Myths and determine how much is rooted in truth.  He lists the core beliefs of the myth as:

1.​    Slavery was a benevolent institution for all involved but was dying by 1861. There was therefore no need to abolish slavery suddenly, especially by war.

2.​    States’ rights, not slavery, was the cause of secession and the establishment of the Confederacy and thus of the Civil War.

3.​    The Confederacy had no chance of winning the Civil War and did the best it could with the limited resources it had.

4.​    Robert E. Lee, who led the Confederates to a near-victory, was one of the greatest generals in history.

5.​    James Longstreet caused Lee to lose the Battle of Gettysburg and thus the Civil War.

6.​    Ulysses S. Grant was an incompetent “butcher” who won the war only by brute force and superior numbers.

7.​    The Union won the war by waging unprecedented and precedent-setting “total war.”

He shows, conclusively, that nearly all of these legends are nothing more than myths.

The Confederacy’s founding fathers, at least before they lost the war, made no bones about their desire to protect slavery. They believed that the North would eventually seek to limit slavery, if not abolish slavery completely, which would mean economic death for the South’s ruling class. Slavery was still a money-maker in those days and the idea that the federal government could have solved the problem by purchasing the slaves and freeing them (a concept put forward in hindsight by John Ross) is simply allohistorical. Indeed, the states that would eventually make up the CSA complained bitterly that the federal government was not doing enough to capture and return runaway slaves, or crack down on Northerners willing to assist the slaves and oppose anyone attempting to return the runaways to their masters. As the political situation broke down, the early founding fathers attempted to work with other states to form a united block and chose to work solely with slave owning states.  There was a strong correlation between the number of slaves in any given state and its willingness to secede.

The desire to preserve slavery was, in short, the driving force behind the early Civil War. This is testified in their own words, despite the best attempts to disavow their actions after the war. As Bonekemper notes:

“Post-war backing and filling by Stephens and Davis attempted to cover their slavery tracks. Stephens got off to an early start in a summer 1865 journal entry claiming that his Cornerstone Speech had been misquoted by a Savannah reporter. The length and depth of such a “misquote” would have been astounding. Stephens failed to address similar “misquotes” by an Atlanta reporter of a contemporaneous speech in which he said Confederate Constitution framers “solemnly discarded the pestilent heresy of fancy politicians, that all men, of all races, were equal, and we had made African inequality and subordination, and the equality of white men, the chief corner stone of the Southern Republic.”

He was not alone. Jefferson Davis did the same kind of revision in his memoirs, insisting the Confederacy was about constitutional government, supremacy of law, and the natural rights of man.

The Confederate desire to preserve slavery was so extreme they actually sabotaged their own war effort. They refuse to make slavery-related concessions that might have convinced Britain and France to intervene. Worse, the idea of using black soldiers were so unthinkable to their leadership that they refuse to even consider it until it was far too late. Slaves were property, not fighting men. Making them fighting men would turn the Confederacy upside down, with serious effects on the Confederacy’s social structure. The officer who suggested recruiting black soldiers found his career had hit a dead end, while General Lee’s conversion to the idea of recruiting blacks came far too late.  Indeed, what steps they took in that direction were, at best, half-hearted and clearly designed to put the slaves back in their place after the war was over. Put bluntly, the myth that black soldiers fought for the Confederacy, again, is nothing more than a fable.

The idea that slavery was somehow good for the slaves, and their masters, is heavily debunked. The slaves lived in conditions of unimaginable suffering. Their masters lived in fear of a slave revolt, all the while treating the slaves in a manner that made revolution inevitable. They worked hard to paper over the cracks in their society through creating and myth of southern womanhood – a myth that concealed sexual abuse of female slaves and subsequent illiterate children - and told themselves they needed to defend white women against revolting slaves. The suggestion that women would be raped, or forced to marry blacks, was raised every time anyone suggested liberating the slaves. It is no surprise that so many slaves fled the plantations, or joined the North, or found other ways to strike back at their masters. There was no such thing as a ‘good’ master.

The book then assesses the claim the south could not have won the war. Bonekemper believes it was at least possible for the CSA to make its independence stick, but it would require the South to stay on the defensive and force the North to come to them, hopefully racking up enough casualties to ensure Lincoln lost the election of 1864. Instead, the South risked everything on an invasion of the North, which met its end at Gettysburg. The South simply did not have the resources to fight an offensive war and the decision to do so was a dreadful mistake.

Bonekemper moves on to examine the myth of Robert E. Lee, who has acquired the veneer of honourable general fighting for a dishonourable cause (a veneer held by, among others, Erwin Rommel) and a military reputation that is at stark variance with the facts. While some early writers criticised Lee, later hagiographers turned him into the man who could do no wrong. Bonekemper rather snidely notes that his later biographers turned him into a mixture of King Arthur and Jesus, to the point that a woman even bought her baby to be blessed by the dying general. This makes little sense when viewed objectively, as the CSA lost the war; subjectively, this helped to push the myth of the South being crushed by overwhelmingly superior force.

Lee was not, however, a great strategist. He went on the offensive, first covertly in his Antietam campaign and overtly in his Gettysburg campaign, ruining what little strategic planning the Confederacy actually did (Davies preferred a defensive approach to the war) and making mistakes that cost the Confederacy manpower it could not replace. He was also intensely fixated on Virginia, his home state, and never fully realise the importance of other states in the war. His assessment of how to fight the war, during his time as Davis’s primary military adviser, was therefore fundamentally flawed. He accidentally gave Grant a victory over Bragg that helped shorten the war.

Nor was he a particularly great general. He had a very small command staff that was largely incapable of rising to the challenges it faced. He was lucky, during his early victories, to face Northern generals who were equally incapable; the peninsula campaign would have gone the other way, perhaps, if Lee had faced Grant or Sherman instead of McClellan. He was also lucky that Davies was firmly on his side, allowing Longstreet to take the blame for losing the Battle of Gettysburg, and were no consequences for failing to send Longstreet and his men to reinforce Bragg. 

Longstreet’s willingness to argue with Lee, and his later decision to join the Republican Party, made him an easy scapegoat. He was demonised even as Lee was canonised, to the point that Bonekemper notes that Douglas Southall Freeman’s Lee’s Lieutenants should really have been called Lee’s Scapegoats.  It is notable that most of the Confederate officers who condemned Longstreet were not known for being competent.

Bonekemper’s assessment is curt:

“Robert E. Lee, therefore, bore a great deal of responsibility for a demoralizing triple disaster in the summer of 1863—Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Tullahoma. Confederate morale and prospects fell to a new low from which they never recovered. Longstreet had advised defensive tactics for the campaign and was against attacking on the last two days of the battle. He was not present on the first day, and his men fought bravely on the last two days. That evidence seems to indicate that Longstreet was unfairly made a scapegoat for Gettysburg in order to remove blame from Lee, who protected his own reputation by suppressing Pickett’s battle report.”

Bonekemper moves on to compare and contrast Grant to Lee as commanding officers. Grant was not, in the Southern sense, a gentleman. This might well have been a major advantage: Grant was modest, disinclined to meddle in politics, capable of assessing the battlefield, making best use of his staff, issuing lucid orders to his subordinates, making best use of superior resources and, most importantly of all, never giving up. Grant avoided many of the mistakes Lee made during the early years of the war, and learnt from his own mistakes.  Bonekemper argues that the claim Grant was a butcher does not hold water. His losses were surprisingly low.

Linked to this, Bonekemper debunks the claim the North won by waging a total war. It cannot be denied that brutality was part and parcel of war, and always will be, nor can it be denied that the South was forced to resort to scavenging during the invasion of the North and what few payments were made were made in worthless Southern currency. It is unlikely they would have been honoured even if the South had won the war. Regardless, the South was far more brutal than the North and, linked to its determination to preserve slavery at all costs, murdered surrendering black soldiers and refused to trade black soldiers for white prisoners even though this harmed the South star more than the North. The North could replace its losses. The South could not.

The North’s invasion of the South did immense damage, both directly and indirectly (particularly in liberating slaves who did not, obviously, want to stay with their masters). There are, however, few reports of rapes or civilian killings.  As Bonekemper notes:

“A recent study by Lisa Frank of the relationship between [Sherman’s] soldiers and Southern women excoriates the soldiers for entering bedrooms and parlours, as well as seizing personal treasures and letters, in an effort to humiliate and demoralize elite white women along their route. There is no mention of rape or murder.”

It is possible, given the mores of that time, that a number of atrocities went unreported.  But it is quite likely that the original myth-makers behind the Lost Cause would have found them and put them to use.

The book concludes with a grim note:

“The Myth of the Lost Cause may have been the most successful propaganda campaign in American history. For almost 150 years it has shaped our view of the causation and fighting of the Civil War. As discussed in detail in prior chapters, the Myth was just that—a false concoction intended to justify the Civil War and the South’s expending so much energy and blood in defense of slavery.”

This assessment is almost certainly correct. One may argue that slavery was economically important, if not vital, to the South, and attempts to defend it were therefore justified. This ignores the cold fact that the plantation system was based on human slavery, and the idea that it should be permitted to exist is a crime against humanity. One might also argue that slavery was declining, and would eventually vanish without a war, but if that was true why would the South expend so much blood and treasure to keep the peculiar institution? Indeed, while the Civil War has often been called a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” it is notable that soldier slaveowners had higher casualties and lower desertion rates, a fact that suggests a degree of investment in maintaining slavery. The South had good reason to believe the slavery boom would continue, and acted accordingly. It might have been wrong – the Boil Weevil was already advancing towards the American South and would, historically, have devastated the plantations in the 1920s - but it had no way to know it at the time.

Slavery also served a secondary purpose:

“In addition to the economic value of slavery, there was the social value to consider. The institution was based on white supremacy and provided the elite planter class with a means of mollifying the large majority of whites who were not slave-owners. In addition to aspiring to become slave-owners, these other whites could at least endure their low economic and social status by embracing their superiority to blacks in Southern society.”

It is true that there were other motives behind succession than slavery. But the words of the Confederate founding fathers provide the best evidence that maintaining slavery loomed large in their minds:

“They railed against “Black Republicans,” the supposedly abolitionist Lincoln, the failure to enforce the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause and federal fugitive slave acts, the threat to the South’s multi-billion-dollar investment in slaves, abolitionism, racial equality, and the threat blacks posed to Southern womanhood. These documents make it clear that slavery was not only the primary cause of secession but virtually the only cause.”

As noted above, they were so determined to maintain slavery that it may well have cost them the war.

Bonekemper ends his book with a simple conclusion:

“The Myth of the Lost Cause, then, is a tangle of falsehoods. It should no longer play a significant role in the historiography and Americans’ understanding of the Civil War.”

The book does not assess the modern day belief in the Lost Cause and its challengers. Nor does it assess the complicated political and social questions behind the desire to knock down and destroy Confederate monuments, or reappraisals of American history. This is both unfortunate and probably wise. The efforts of the original myth-makers took root in the former CSA, which was looking for something to explain their defeat as well as justify their actions, and spread widely. Indeed, as successive generations pass, it seems more and more unfair that, on one hand, there is no major reassessment of history and, on the other, that people who never owned slaves (and in many cases do not have slaveholders in the family tree) should be penalised for the crimes of their (supposed) ancestors. We have reached a point where both sides feel victimised, which is not conductive to putting the past in the past where it belongs.

In conclusion, Bonekemper’s assessment of the myth is nicely detailed and backed up by textual evidence. It does not provide a history of the South, or the myth itself, but takes it apart piece by piece. It avoids many of the mistakes of earlier historians, some of whom contributed to the myth themselves (deliberately or otherwise), and is a fitting introduction to the first social issue that could not be compromised because both sides had different principles and different understandings of how the world worked, and therefore had to fight it out.  And it is also a warning of what happens when you do.