How the Cult of Robert E. Lee Was Born

[O' Be Joyful]

The more things change...

The reason the South fought the American Civil War has been contested ever since the Confederacy surrendered in 1865. An odd turn of events, considering that when 11 Southern states seceded from the Union at the war’s outset, they were very clear about why they were doing it.

In declaration after declaration, Confederate states explicitly said that they had seceded in order to preserve slavery.
South Carolina, the first to secede, cited “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” in its declaration of secession. Mississippi’s declaration argued “There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union.”

It was only after the war that many former Confederates changed course, creating an alternative narrative that historians refer to as the “Lost Cause.”

“It began right at the end of the Civil War as Southerners tried to explain their own defeat to themselves,” says David W. Blight, an American history professor at Yale and author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Writers, journalists, and former soldiers began “to fashion this series of ideas, one of which was their belief that they were never truly defeated on the battlefield; that they were only overwhelmed.”devilla/Getty Images
They also argued, in direct contradiction to their secession statements, that the war was never about slavery.

Lost Causers argued “they had only fought for state sovereignty, states’ rights, national independence,” Blight says. “They also fashioned a set of ideas and arguments that they were fighting to hold back the massive industrialization of America, they were trying to preserve rural agrarian civilization.”

(snip)

“By the 1890s, the Lost Cause arguments had become really a racial ideology, they had become a set of arguments for white supremacy,” he says. The idea that slavery had been a gentle institution that benefited both masters and slaves, and that freedmen could not handle their emancipation, was a foundation upon which Jim Crow laws were built.

How the Cult of Robert E. Lee Was Born | HISTORY

History is usually written by the victors, but not in this case.

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[Mike12]

The South was a Reactionary Cause. In political science, a reactionary or reactionist is a person or entity holding political views that favour a return to a previous political state of society that they believe possessed positive characteristics that are absent in contemporary society. As an adjective, the word reactionary describes points of view and policies meant to restore a past status quo.

When you say or some opinion articles say they are a Lost Cause, you know what I take as that meaning, it seems the meaning is nothing in America should ever be recovered, ever. We're in eternal revolution where the mass mob again gets to tell whatever the future is of what that Country is and what our children will be, in every single sphere.

Every single person using "Lost Cause" will silence every ideal of that Cause. That so many were in debate of our central documents with blood on the great altar of freedom, there is a patriotism there that at least most in normal society seemed to understand, except the fringe.

Nowhere in these articles is the ideal that the Church is an international entity, that it will unite all the Nations, and George Washington created Thanksgiving with comment to the Ruler of Nations, that it was this order at our revolution, a Nation of common people, a Government, a flag, and a high Church that approves and sanctifies our leaders. John Witherspoon reveals the spirit of these founding documents in a Communion of Presbyterian Nations and no other Church, and zeal piety and fealty is due. People need to check out the "Wallace Cannonball".

After this state of affairs, of course the sovereign states are being dissolved by the hungry stomach of a Union. The same states such as Virginia that provide any meaning, any signature of power and contractual power like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we imagine, must somehow be reduced to poverty by their signatures? A Native Hawaiian knows a brave freedom. This country shows its stripes of an invader in every step, it toppled a British acknowledgment of their kingdom, it created a territory, it made a State which appears technically White by some imagination in origin.

All these people like is the word "slavery", what did our ancestors hear though? Servants. The Constitution was involuntary servitude. That would be constitutional. One reason was payment for transport. If every African were a criminal from London the transport of involuntary servitude for passage is 7 years? African Americans are in no way responsible for a government Out of Control on the topic of religion. There were over a million Presbyterian African Americans, with their forefathers, as if, the South or the masters or white Civilization revealed Any Christianity of Any value into life. That had to be plucked away in the shady dealings of the Eisenhower administration about integration, then the '83 Ronald Reagan Martin Luther King Jr. day. ALl that is left in civil society to an African American is Also to Forget his Fathers o his God and to surrender meaningful political clout in Europe or around the world in the arrayed arms of Christian conflicts for these tribal individualist religious American groups.