So, are Southern children still being taught the falsehoods of the Evil Cause?
This question is a reasonable one to ask considering the nonsense that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III tweeted on 12 June 2020.
Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions tussled on Twitter over a congressional proposal to strip Confederate leaders’ names from military assets, with the Democratic senator defending his vote and the man vying to unseat him arguing such a move ‘betrays the character and decency of every soldier who fought for the South.’
The GOP-led Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this week adopted an amendment to remove Confederate names and symbols from military bases and assets with the support of some Republicans, even as President Donald Trump said he’s opposed to any such effort. Jones supported the proposal.
Apparently, Session is a firm believer in the Evil Cause, commonly referred to as the Lost Cause.
From former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu (Smithsonian, 12 March 2018):
The Cult of the Lost Cause. There it was in black and white, in a 1999 application to put the equestrian statue of General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2015, after a year of closely guarded discussions about Confederate monuments in New Orleans, most particularly Robert E. Lee, I asked a few members of my staff to go down to the main branch of the public library to get relevant research documents from the city archives. I wanted to know how and why these statues were erected and if there were any legal protections that would prevent us from moving them.
It turns out that among news clippings, drawings and maps, they turned up applications to place the statues on the National Register of Historic Places. Preservationists and city and state officials petitioned the United States Department of the Interior, through the National Park Service, for three statues in Louisiana. As part of that application, extensive research was completed to make the historical case for acceptance. Included in the application was an acknowledgment that the reason for the statues’ very existence was the “Cult of the Lost Cause.”
Here is the description of the Cult of the Lost Cause written on the National Register of Historic Places application:
The Cult of the Lost Cause had its roots in the Southern search for justification and the need to find a substitute for victory in the Civil War. In attempting to deal with defeat, Southerners created an image of the war as a great heroic epic. A major theme of the Cult of the Lost Cause was the clash of two civilizations, one inferior to the other. The North, “invigorated by constant struggle with nature, had become materialistic, grasping for wealth and power.” The South had a “more generous climate” which had led to a finer society based upon “veracity and honor in man, chastity and fidelity in women.” Like tragic heroes, Southerners had waged a noble but doomed struggle to preserve their superior civilization. There was an element of chivalry in the way the South had fought, achieving noteworthy victories against staggering odds. This was the “Lost Cause” as the late nineteenth century saw it, and a whole generation of Southerners set about glorifying and celebrating it.
In The South still lies about the Civil War (Salon, 16 March 2013), journalist Tracy Thompson explains how believers in the Lost Cause control what is written in high school history books used in southern states.
In Confessions of a former neo-Confederate (Vox, 16 December 2016), historian Dr. William R. Black explains why the Lost Cause is a colossal lie:
As I read different historians, considered their arguments, sifted through their footnotes, and consulted their primary sources, it became clear the Lost Cause was a pernicious myth. There was nothing benevolent about a world in which an enslaved person could wake up any given morning to find her children had been sold.
Nor was slavery a mere wedge issue. Serious money was at stake. Slaves were worth more money in 1860 than all of America’s factories, railroads, and banks combined. And it wasn’t just slaveholders who had a stake in the so-called peculiar institution, because every white Southerner, even the poorest dirt farmer, drew comfort from the knowledge they would never be on the bottom rung of society so long as slavery remained in place.
The Confederates were clear: They were seceding to protect slavery. Just read Mississippi’s secession ordinance: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.” Or read the Confederate vice president’s proclamation that the “cornerstone” of the new nation was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”
In his college honors thesis Lost Cause Textbooks: Civil War Education in the South from the 1890s to the 1920s (University of Mississippi, May 2018), Earl Connor King explains his miseducation as a high school student growing up in the South:
I grew up and attended schools in Mississippi all my life. My personal history with Mississippi schools and history textbooks helped me notice a difference in how the Civil War was taught between the primary and secondary school level and the collegiate level. In middle school and high school, my textbooks presented the Civil War as a conflict between two distinct cultures and economic systems. The South left the Union
because it valued states’ rights and the North fought the South to preserve national unity. There was little mention of slavery and a heavy emphasis on sectional differences being the cause of the war. Being a young student that only liked to look at the pictures and maps of battles in textbooks, I was completely fine with the way I was taught the Civil War. Then I attended the University of Mississippi. In my History and English courses, I read multiple slave narratives which provided a greater perspective on the southern past. I was taught how causal the institution of slavery in the South was in bringing about the Civil War. After learning this new information about the antebellum South and the Civil War, I asked myself: “Why was I not taught this sooner?” So I attempted to find out why I was not taught in middle school and high school about slavery, the real reason why the South seceded and why the war was fought.. . . The interpretation of Confederate emblems, monuments, and memory has become a point of contentious debate in the United States over the past few years. Some groups argue that the symbols are physical embodiments of hatred and white supremacy. Other groups claim that these Confederate symbols are mere representations of an old, honored heritage. Of course, the complete nature of that heritage is seldom explicated by members of this latter group, explicitly that the antebellum South placed millions of African Americans in bondage. Why is it that, in the twenty-first century, many Americans all across the country are able to defend and even glorify a regime so steeped in cruelty towards other human beings? Because many Americans have not been taught that the Confederacy fought because of slavery’s presence in the South.
In Tributes to traitors finally fall (11 June 2020), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Cynthia Tucker writes, “Around the country, Confederate statues and insignia are being stripped from places of honor as business, political and cultural leaders belatedly recognize their odious symbolism … It’s long past time that the saints of the Lost Cause lose their esteemed places at the entrances to courthouses, in carefully tended public parks, even in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.”
Tucker is correct. The presence of Confederate statues and insignia in places honor just reinforces the miseducation about the 19th-Century Confederacy. Its cause was an evil cause no matter what its defenders say.
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