The Lost Cause: a Column Revisited
"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)
"How do you spell ICE in German? GESTAPO."
"First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me."
Pastor Martin Niemoller (c. 1946)
Heather Cox Richardson summed it up so well (as per usual): "Led by Donald Trump, MAGA Republicans are trying to take the country back to the past, rewriting history by imposing the ideology of the Confederacy on the United States of America."
And see Click Here May 16, 2024.
On what, when I was a boy, was called Armistice Day (now Called Veterans Day,) Nov. 11, 2021, I published a column entitled: Racism, Historical Fact, and 'The Lost Cause'. In the introduction I noted that the tradition of the use of racism as a political weapon by the Republican Party can be traced back to its founding in the 1850s on the wreckage (over the issue of slavery) of the Whig Party (see:"Xenophobia and Racism: They're in the Republican Party's DNA. "This column is largely based on the earlier one [click here.])
Alexander Stephens was Vice-President of the Confederate States of America (CSA), and following the death of John C. Calhoun in 1850, its principal theoretician. At the beginning of the First Civil War,Stephens said this about Southern slavery and its justification, because the (by then) African-American* slaves were "inferior." He said:
"Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race. Such were, and are in violation of the laws of nature[emphasis added]. Our system commits no such violation of nature's law. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the Negro. [Emphasis added.] Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Cain, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. Our new government is founded on the opposite idea of the equality of the races. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the Negro is not equal to the White man; that slavery --- subordination to the superior race --- is his natural condition. "
What is happening right now in our nation easily brings to mind the very important book, given the history of the U.S., in which, for example, race and racism were built into the Constitution,The 1619 Project. Of course it, and the accompanying approach to teaching and learning about its contents, Critical Race Theory (CRT), brought and did elicit cries of outrage from Republicans, to the point where its teaching is widely banned in broad stretches of the education landscape. In current U.S. Republican politics, "CRT" has become shorthand for "they're indoctrinating our children with all sorts of stuff that is entirely unfair, inappropriate, unsuitable, and just dead wrong --- we are NOT racists; we just don't want our children exposed to any history or evidence that might indicate that we are." And of course now Trump, who wants to ban, or at least mythologize, the teaching about racism, Jim Crow, and the modern role that racism plays in so many sectors of our society and economy, is actually bring in back words to the effect of slavery wasn't as bad as it has been made out to be.
Now as it happens, accompanying these political strategies and tactics is a (so far) subtle revival of the post-Civil War "Myth of the Lost Cause." As a (referenced) book by that name says:
" The Myth of the Lost Cause was a constructed historical narrative on the causes of the Civil War. It argued that despite the Confederacy losing the Civil War, their cause was a heroic and just one, based on defending one's homeland, state's rights, and the constitutional right to secession.
"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 of the Lost Cause 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."
It was developed in the 1890's, declined at about the time of the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960, but it has never really gone away. Its persistence in the political consciousness in certain parts of the country is in line with the hypothesis that the South actually won the civil war. This is a subject on which I have been writing(in short form) since 2009 (more recently in 2018). Heather Cox Richardson, Prof. of History at Boston College, published a very important book on the subject in 2020. My own hypothesis thesis on how the South won can be boiled down to this:
1. Chattel slavery is of course long-gone, but for a century it was replaced by "Jim Crow," and Blacks are still majorly discriminated against socio-economically. terms in the South, it existed on a certain level well into the last century.
2. Since the end of the War, The Dogma of White Supremacy continued to dominate the national political stage.
3. North American Continental Imperialism ended with the accession to statehood by Arizona in 1912. However, expansion beyond the boundaries of North America began with the annexation of Hawaii (1898) and has literally or figuratively continued since.
4. The "states' rights" basis of allotting seats in the United States Senate (which was of course put into the Constitution purely for the benefit of the slave-holding states) as well as votes in the Electoral College has of course continued, and current Republican policy is making it even worse.
5. A major element of Southern politics was the use of the Big Lie Technique. First that Africans and African-Americans were inferior beings, not "human." Second, that the Civil War, initiated by the Forces of Secession in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina on April 12, 1861, was about "Southern Freedom." That of course included the freedom to maintain slavery, and to expand it into the Western Territories, without too much in the way of limitations.
6. At the same time that the CSA was fighting so bitterly and for so long primarily to defend the institution of slavery, it was able to get several hundred thousand poor white farmers and laborers to give their lives in the cause. How? By using the Doctrine of White Supremacy to convince them that they were indeed fighting for "freedom."
7. Central to the "Lost Cause" narrative, is the construct that the war was not the result of a rebellion, but rather a "War Between the States," or, as a recent President of the NRA referred to it "The War of Northern Aggression," or "Abraham Lincoln's War," or "The War for Southern Independence., that it was all about "states' rights" and "liberty" (for whites, and especially slave-owners, only, of course). This kind of thinking of course just feeds directly into the current Republican narrative of "states' rights" and barely disguised racism.
And so now we are seeing the revival of the "Lost Cause" doctrine, in modern dress, that is, once again, that the War was really about "states' rights," and "Southern freedom," as noted above. (That the "rights" and the "freedoms" included the maintenance and the expansion of slavery, is conveniently forgotten.) It also included the elements in item 7 just above.
Really? Golly gee. I guess I have just been reading history the wrong way, or maybe I've gotten my facts wrong all these years. But as I understand it, after Lincoln's election as President, in a four-way race in which there were actually two southern parties, the Southern Democrats, and the Constitutional Union Party, on Dec. 24, 1860, well before his scheduled Inauguration on March 4, the state of South Carolina announced its secession from the Union, then followed in order by ten other Southern states.
As it happens, the process of secession is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. So golly gee (again), I wonder who might be considered to be a "breaker" of the Constitution? By Feb. 8, 1861, again before Lincoln had been inaugurated, ten other Southern sates had undertaken the non-Constitutional step of seceding from the Union, to form the Confederate States of America. Same question.
And it is, just like so many of the arguments that Republicans these days use to support their positions and policies (see "The Big Lie"), are not based on fact. So any argument that, as for example, "Lincoln destroyed the Constitution," which, as I have shown above, is simply not based on historical fact or necessity, plays right into the Republicans' hands.
The Myth of the Lost Cause Now Appears to be making its return, courtesy of President Trump and his minions, not riding on horses (for at least Trump couldn't even get up on one, much ride it), but seated comfortably in a Humvee (or similar).