Lost Cause of the Confederacy

The Lost Cause was a movement that attempted to reconcile the Confederacy's loss of the American Civil War. The South was devastated both physically and psychologically by its defeat in 1865. Many southerners sought relief by attributing their loss to factors beyond their control and to betrayals of their heroes.

The term Lost Cause first appeared as the title of the 1866 book on the Confederacy by historian Edward A. Pollard. However, it was the formation of the Southern Historical Society by Lieut. Gen. Jubal Early in the 1870s that established the Lost Cause as a cultural and literary phenomenon that lasted for decades.

Proponents of the Lost Cause espoused opinions ("truths") about the Confederacy and the war in general:

• The preservation of slavery was not the primary reason for eleven southern states to secede from the Union and precipitate the war.
• Secession was a justifiable constitutional response to Northern cultural and economic aggressions against the Southern way of life.
• The famous generals such as Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson represented the virtues of Southern nobility and the purest, invincible warrior spirits.
• Losses on the battlefield were inevitable due to overwhelming Northern superiority in men and resources.
• Losses were also the result of betrayals and incompetence of key subordinates to Lee. (The Lost Cause focused mainly on Lee and the eastern theater of operations.)

In terms of Lee's subordinates, the key villain in Jubal Early's view was Lieut. Gen. James Longstreet. Early's writings place the Confederate defeat at the Battle of Gettysburg squarely on Longstreet's shoulders, accusing him of failing to attack early in the morning of July 2, 1863, against Lee's orders. Lee, in fact, never expressed dissatisfaction with the second-day actions of his "Old War Horse". Longstreet was widely disparaged by Southern veterans because of his post-war cooperation with President Ulysses S. Grant and for joining the Republican Party. It is unknown whether Early really believed these accusations or whether he was simply trying to play down his own lackluster participation at Gettysburg and the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1864.

A later manifestation of the Lost Cause mentality can been seen in Douglas Southall Freeman's definitive four-volume biography of Lee, published in 1934. Lee could do no wrong; his subordinates were to blame. Another was in the 1936 novel Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and the movie of the same name. The Southerners were portrayed as nobile, heroic figures, living in a society conservative but romantic, who tragically succumbed only to overwhelming forces. A similar treatment appeared in the earlier film The Birth of a Nation.

Today, the Lost Cause is no longer the dominant theme of Civil War historians and the "truths" that formed its tenets have been widely discredited or challenged.