A Liberal Dose, June 10, 2021
Troy D. Smith
"What Is Lost Cause Ideology?"
Last week I talked about the fact that, in popular memory in
the South, the Civil War was not “really” about slavery –even though the
documents from the time show that pretty much everyone on both sides, at the
beginning of that war, agreed it was being fought over slavery. I can assure
you that, among professional academic historians (who are specifically trained
to study and evaluate the documents of the past), it is almost universally
agreed that the primary cause of that conflict was slavery.
And yet in 2011, the 150th anniversary of the
war, national polls indicated that 48% of Americans cited states’ rights as the
main cause of the Civil War, with only 38% saying slavery. Another set of polls
in 2015 were a little bit closer, divided almost down the middle, but according
to the Washington Post (Aug. 6, 2015) white people, people over 60, and
Republicans were more likely to oppose slavery being taught in schools as the
main reason for the war. Still, a significant minority of non-white people,
Northerners, and Democrats felt the same way. Now, to me, saying the Civil War
was about states’ rights is like saying the Civil Rights movement wasn’t about
racism –it was about states’ rights to be racist or not. It’s a moot point.
Slave-holding states were for states’ rights when those rights protected
slavery, and against them when it did not. Southern politicians were opposed to
the right of newly forming states to decide for themselves whether to allow
slavery or not, or the rights of Northern states to decide whether or not to
return runaway slaves.
It is important to note that the Confederacy and the South
were not necessarily always the same thing. About one-third of white
Southerners supported the Union. When you count the slaves, almost half the
population in the South was against the Confederacy. Tennessee, by the way,
provided the most Union troops of any Confederate state. But do you know where
Union sentiment was highest? In Appalachia –where you can’t grow cotton, and
the population was not dependent on slave labor. That speaks volumes.
The fact is, after the war –when slavery was ended –was when
many Southerners started saying the conflict had not been over slavery,
something they all basically agreed was the cause in the beginning. Many
Southern leaders, artists, and intellectuals started developing what historians
call “the Lost Cause Ideology.” That ideology has several components: that
slavery was not the main cause of the war, that slavery hadn’t really been that
bad anyway, and that the Confederacy had been a noble lost cause to protect a
better way of life. I assure you, none of those things were true –especially if
you did not happen to be rich and white.
But the truth was ugly, and most people didn’t want to face
it. They preferred, instead, to make up a mythology about a chivalrous,
beneficent world where even the slaves were happy. Have you ever noticed how,
in Gone with the Wind, none of the black people are ever mad about anything
until the mean Yankees show up and disrupt their idyllic world?
In recent decades, that perception has gone beyond the
borders of the South –just as you are now likely to see Confederate battle
flags being waved in places that were firmly anti-Confederate, from New England
to the West Coast. Claims that Confederate mythology and imagery is history and
heritage coming from people who are not Southern seems strange- and indicates
there is more going on than regional pride.
The Lost Cause version of the Confederacy is not tethered to
fact and reality. It is an exercise in making up a story that makes you feel
good –or at the very least doesn’t make you feel bad –rather than learning from
the past. And passing laws to prevent anybody from questioning that story is
not “protecting history” –it is protecting your own feelings.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
A complete list of "A Liberal Dose" columns can be found HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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