-The day after Richmond fell,
Abraham Lincoln came to Richmond.
He came to this house.
General Weitzel says, "Mr President,
how should we treat these people"?
And Lincoln says, "Let 'em up easy".
-Richmond, Virginia, was the capital of the Confederacy
and that's kinda hard to miss,
considering all of the monuments to Confederate
war heroes throughout the city.
It is very rare for the losing side of a war to have monuments.
-Guess what else is real rare in world history?
The whole way we ended the Civil War.
-But those statues take on a really charged
feeling for people.
-We have a clash around memory and heritage
and what it means, with regard to the American Civil War.
-Civil wars usually end with the losers
goin' to the hangman's noose, the guillotine,
to prison, to exile, or somethin',
and, in this case, they just went home.
-In America today, almost half the country
believes that the Civil War was about states' rights,
but the historical record shows
that the Civil War was about slavery.
I talked to Waite Rawls, the former president
of the Museum of the Confederacy to get some answers.
-Was slavery the principal cause of that political dispute?
Yeah! Yeah!
There's no way to deny that.
But to say "Confederacy's" synonymous with "racist"
is to connote, "And nobody else was
and they were all by themselves in that".
99% of the white people living in the United States
in 1860 were racist, including Abraham Lincoln.
-Initially, Lincoln was not in favor of giving Blacks
voting rights, or allowing them to hold office,
or even intermarry with whites.
Eventually, he did make incredible steps forward,
in terms of equal rights, like the Thirteenth Amendment
and the Freedmen's Bureau Bill.
But his main priority, at the time,
was keeping the Union together.
So, he also pardoned all the Confederates
and vetoed legislation banning slavery altogether.
Back then, white supremacy was the nation's
prevailing social order throughout all of the Union.
-Another side of reconciling is,
"We gotta push those African Americans out of the way.
They're in the way to the national reconciliation
of the white North and the white South".
That gives ground for the Lost Cause,
politically, which was, "We couldn't have been wrong.
We simply must have been outnumbered".
-The Lost Cause was a national propaganda campaign
to misrepresent what the Civil War was actually about.
The main tenets of the Lost Cause
are that the Confederacy was fighting for states' rights,
not slavery; that slaves had great working conditions,
were loyal to their masters,
and often fought for the Confederacy.
Portraying slave owners as kind and Southerners,
in general, as more steeped in Christian values
in order to make the case that they were fighting
for a just cause and only lost because they were outnumbered.
-It is a reflection of a need for Southerners
to reconcile their grief over significant losses:
the total disruption, initially,
of their social order of white supremacy,
whether you were slaveholding or not.
-But, how did we get to a point
where a propaganda campaign became American history?
-General Moore, at 99, follows the heroic debt of the South
to a soldier's grave in Selma, Alabama,
as the last tiny handful of the boys in gray
prepares for the final Confederate reunion
in Norfolk, Virginia.
-The women, who are most responsible for this,
did an extraordinary job.
-A lot of the Lost Cause narratives can be traced back
to funerals for Confederate soldiers
and the women they left behind after the war.
Women all over the South started creating memorial associations
to collect the bodies of Confederate soldiers,
properly bury them,
and create monuments to their fallen heroes.
One of the most prominent groups
was the Confederate Memorial Literary Society.
-They send out a call to prominent white women
throughout the South and say,
"We have to preserve the legacy of our loved ones,"
and they open up what they call the Confederate Museum
and it is a hit.
-It was a shrine.
It was a shrine to the Confederacy.
-Each room of the house was set up with these artifacts
from each of the Confederate states.
But it's only their story.
If Black folk are represented,
it's because they're the loyal, loving slave, supposedly.
-One of the underrepresented stories
of the American Civil War is the US colored troops.
At the end of the war, there were more Black men
in blue uniforms than white men in gray uniform.
People need to know that!
-We have completely removed Black people from the narrative,
when they were central to it.
-The Lost Cause made its way into popular culture,
through films like
"Birth of a Nation" and "Gone with the Wind".
-Your ma said the Confederacy needs us,
so we's gonna dig for the South.
Don't worry. We'll stop them Yankees!
-Goodbye, Big Sam. Goodbye, boys.
-And, eventually, found its way into school textbooks,
and even legislation.
-This group has nothing to do
with discrimination that Congress prohibits.
Nor do they advocate radical positions.
-1910, they make the decision that, "Hey,
no more textbooks that speak ill of the Confederacy".
And that persists until today, in some places.
-In 2018, Christy and Waite decided to merge their museums
to provide a more accurate picture of the Civil War,
from multiple perspectives.
-What you want is for people
to form their own perspective, fully informed.
-What's the harm in people not knowing the Lost Cause?
-The harm comes when there is a disrespect for dignity of life
that becomes sort of generational
because it's grounded in a series of lies.
-The history has never been about the dead people, really.
It's always about us and the moment that we're in
and the issues we're trying to contemplate
and wanting to understand sort of this connective tissue.
It's always been that.
-DO you feel like Richmond is going through
its own sort of truth and reconciliation process
through these challenging discourses,
disagreements, and representations of the city?
-I think Richmond is going through a period of awakening.
The only way that you really can come
to some form of conciliatory behavior
is when everybody finally understands it
and has a desire to move forward in a more equitable way.
This is what we do in museums.
The challenge is helping people build new memories,
so they can create a more accurate heritage.
-The American experiment was a huge advance
into somethin' very, very new.
And they called it an experiment all the time.
We need to continue calling it an experiment,
which means that it can get better,
if we keep working at it.