The Civil War was the bloodiest war in American history.
Of the nearly 3 million men who fought on both sides, over 620,000 soldiers died in
battle, or of disease, during the war – more than all the wars in American history combined.
Hundreds of thousands of men were also wounded during the war, with handicapped veterans
commonplace in America after the war.
While casualties were high on both sides, the South suffered more than the North.
About 20% of white male Southerners died in the war, which in turn left many children
as orphans and many women as widows – often without the possibility of remarriage.
As historian Drew Gilpin Faust argues in her book, The Republic of Suffering, Americans
who lived during the Civil War spent the remainder of their lives dealing with grief and loss.
The work of mourning – including public displays of bereavement and care for grays,
fell disproportionately on women.
Making closure even more difficult, the bodies of many men who died were never recovered
in order to be shipped home for proper burial.
Besides the loss of human life, the war caused over 5 billion dollars of property damage
– including the destruction of farms; homes; factories; and railroads.
T
The end of the war also meant the end of slavery.
This was an occasion of great rejoicing for slaves and a tremendous expansion of liberty
for the nation.
But the end of slavery also marked the end of an entire society, the antebellum South.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, in the period from 1865 until 1877 known as Reconstruction,
congressional Republicans made a concerted effort to ensure equality before the law and
voting rights for African Americans, especially with the ratification of the 13th and 14th
amendments, as well as the military occupation of the South to enforce this new order.
However, strong resistance on the part of many white southerners to African-American
equality – particularly the part of the Democratic Party – and violent terroristic
groups such as the Ku Klux Klan led to the Democrats retaking control of all state governments
in the South from the Republicans by 1877.
By 1877, many Northerners were tired of dealing with the South and willing to accept the end
of Reconstruction.
Unfortunately, in the decades following Reconstruction, white Democratic governments in the South
made African Americans second-class citizens, including stripping them of voting rights
and passing Jim Crow laws that mandated strict racial segregation in all aspects of social
governmental and economic life.
Although the United States Supreme Court upheld segregation as constitutional in the 1896
Plessy v. Ferguson case provided that facilities were separate, but equal – the reality was
that separate was never equal.
In many ways white supremacists in the South lost the Civil War but won the peace in the
decades that followed, as segregation meant that white supremacy still reigned supreme,
even if slavery was over.
In order to cope with the loss and trauma of the Civil War, as well as to justify the
Jim Crow system, an important interpretation the Civil War known as the Lost Cause narrative
also emerged after the war.
The Lost Cause narrative minimized the immorality of slavery and glorified the antebellum South
as having a noble society and way of life.
Furthermore, the Lost Cause narrative downplays the role of slavery in having caused the war,
arguing that issues such as tariffs; states’ rights; and cultural differences between the
North and South were the real causes of the war.
The Lost Cause narrative portrayed the Confederate cause as a noble one.
Finally, it asserted that the Reconstruction period that followed the war was a fiasco,
as it was marred by Northern corruption and abuses of the South – as well as its management
of state governments, the latter of which was supposedly just justified segregation,
including the exclusion of African American from politics.
As historian David Blight argues in his book, ‘Race and Reunion’, in the decades that
followed the Civil War, the Lost Cause narrative focused on the bravery of soldiers on both
sides and minimization of the issue of slavery helped promote national unity and justify
racism both in the North and the South.
The term ‘lost cause’ originally came from the title of Virginian Edward A. Pollard’s
1866 book about the Civil War entitled, ‘The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the
War of the Confederates’.
While this book was published just after the war itself, Confederate politicians such as
President Jefferson Davis and General Jubal Early published memoirs during the 1870s that
defended their role in the war and likewise pushed the ideology of the Lost Cause.
In the discipline of history, a prominent historian at Columbia University named William
Archibald Dunning became a major proponent of the Lost Cause narrative in the late 19th
century and early 20th century.
Columbia University had a very large and influential PhD program in history at this time, and Dunning
taught an entire generation of graduate students, who then became professors at other universities.
Dunning wrote a number of influential articles in journals, such as The American Historical
Review, and served terms as both the president of the American Historical Association and
American Political Science Association.
Dunning's advocacy of the Lost Cause was so influential that in academic history it has
often been called ‘the Dunning school’.
Despite criticism of the Lost Cause narrative as racist mythology from prominent African-American
intellectuals, such as W.E.
Dubois, the Dunning school dominated the historiography of the Civil War and Reconstruction, from
the late 19th century until historians such as C. Vann Woodward began to discredit it
during the 1950s.
Besides the discipline of history, the Lost Cause narrative had a tremendous impact on
the way the Civil War was memorialized and remembered.
Many Southern states celebrate Confederate holidays, such as the birthday of Robert E.
Lee, and came to include the Confederate battle flags on their state flags.
In popular culture, blockbuster movies such as The Birth of a Nation in the 1920s and
Gone with the Wind in the 1930s, celebrated the Confederacy, promoted the Lost Cause narrative.
In the aftermath of the Civil War and especially during the early decades of Jim Crow, numerous
monuments were also erected to Confederate soldiers that effectively taught the Lost
Cause narrative in stone.
On a local level, a women's organization known as United Daughters of the Confederacy was
very influential throughout the South in raising funds to build monuments to Confederate soldiers
in cemeteries and in public places, such as courthouse squares.
The largest monument to the Confederacy was the massive 400-foot carving of Confederate
leaders Jefferson Davis; Robert E. Lee; and Stonewall Jackson riding their favorite horses
that was carved on the side of Stone Mountain, Georgia during the 1920s – with latter additions
in the 1950s.
The Stone Mountain monument was largely the idea of Helen Plane, an important figure in
the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The second Klan, the Klan of the 1920s, was also refounded at Stone Mountain in 1915 and
the Klan used Stone Mountain as a site of ceremonies and cross burnings for years thereafter.
Overall, most public monuments to the Confederacy were erected during the 1920s and 1950s.
While these were decades in which the last surviving Confederate veterans were dying
off, more importantly they were decades of increased racial tensions; Ku Klux Klan activity;
and in the case of the 1950’s – increasing success on the part of the Civil Rights movement.
In recent years, after a racist gunman opened fire on a Bible study at a predominantly African-American
church in Charleston, South Carolina in June 2015 killing 9 parishioners, public debate
has ensued over the use of Confederate symbols and monuments in public places, with some
localities choosing to remove them because of the racist connotations.
In August 2017, a rally of neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates and other white nationalists called, Unite
the Right, marched in Charlottesville, Virginia to protest the city's decision to remove a
statue of Robert E. Lee from a downtown park.
Debate over Confederate statues is still ongoing and intense, which illustrates the long shadow
that the Civil War and the Lost Cause narrative has cast, and how history really matters.
I'll stop with this observation.
Thanks for watching.