O' Be Joyful
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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.
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.
www.history.com