The Myth of the Lost Cause Myth: What Motivates Spanberger's Heritage Purge?

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast, I'm your host John Harris, I hope you enjoy what we have today.

It is a special treat, I think we're going to talk about some historiography, which is something

I really like because history is the study of the past. As you know, historiography is kind of like the study of the study of the past.

It's understanding the paradigms that we use as human beings to make sense of what came before us, the narratives we adopt, why those narratives were adopted, that kind of thing.

It's kind of like hermeneutics is to Bible study, right? The Bible says something not just about the past, but about a way that we should currently live.

There's wisdom literature and apocalyptic literature and all kinds of things there. And hermeneutics are the rules that govern our approach to that particular document that help us understand what's relevant, what is application, what's just something we should interpret, how do we interpret it?

Should we correlate it with another passage? What does it mean in the context? What's the historical context, right? Historiography is kind of like that.

And so I'm going to do a historiography on the lost cause today, showing you through time, so it's also a history, how people in the academic profession, especially historians, have approached this particular narrative about the

Civil War, what alternatives they have made to this narrative, what they think actually happened.

And there's a really good reason we're doing it. And that's because Abigail Spanberger, the governor of Virginia, has decided to push forward two laws.

One of them barring the tax exempt status in the state of Virginia from organizations that are concerned with Confederate heritage in some form, some connection there.

The other is a stripping of the commemorative license plates of Robert E.

Lee that I used to see in Virginia when I was down there that people would drive around with. They pay a little extra, the state got some revenue.

That's gone now because we shouldn't have Robert E. Lee on the back of a license plate driving around. So she stripped

Virginia of that kind of funding because she doesn't want to see Robert E. Lee, presumably, and neither does the legislature because they passed the law.

So we're going to talk about it in this context. There's been hundreds of these Confederate monuments taken down.

They were really the low -hanging fruit. They were the first to go. Confederate symbols have been under attack for years,

Southern symbols in general. Of course, I think all of us who said this was going to extend to broader

American symbols because Robert E. Lee has been a broader American hero and people like him, we feel pretty vindicated right now.

We were right. It's continuing to happen and it's not making a lot of headlines. It should because this is an attack on not just the

Southern identity, but it's an attack really on American identity more broadly. If they can do it here, they can do it other places.

This is not something that can just be excised. We came back together as a country,

North and South, fought world wars together, enjoyed each other's company, and ribbed each other, and thought of each other in the ways that brothers think of each other, and now it's like that truce is all gone.

If that truce is gone, then what other things can unravel the American identity and the

American as we know it, actually? There's fracture lines all over the place, and I think this contributes to them.

I think it's going to be fun to pursue this as an academic pursuit, but also knowing that there are actual political and cultural implications to this.

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Now, I have an article that I wrote, and we're gonna just go over the article, and pretty simple, but pretty, it's kind of long, where it gets into the details.

And I'm gonna show you some pictures and stuff, but we start at the beginning here. The war after the war is the title, re -examining a lost cause and its critics.

And I wanted to do this while it was fresh in my mind, so you're watching this after I recorded it, and then immediately did this podcast on it.

After the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the new regime under Gustav Husak dismissed 145 historians from Czech universities.

One of the historians, Milan Hubbell, is said to have observed the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory.

Hubbell went on to predict that after a new history takes the shape of the old, the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.

A similar sentiment was expressed by Southerners in the wake of the American Civil War. Confederate General Patrick Claiborne declared, surrender means the history of our heroic struggle will be written by the enemy, that our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers, will learn from Northern school books their version of the war, will be impressed by all the influences of history and education to regard our gallant debtors traders and our main veterans as fit subjects of derision.

One last decade, over the last decade, Claiborne's prophecy has come to pass with hundreds of monuments removed. And I talked about some of that.

And then the bills, HB 167 and 1344, which affected the license plates and the tax exempt status of heritage groups.

The current purge is not surprising though, as most conquered peoples meet similar fates, but it has been somewhat delayed. Part of the reason for this and for continued efforts to eradicate unreconstructed sentiment lies in the way many

Southerners stubbornly held onto their past. When the cannons fell silent in 1865, the pens became the only weapon the

South had left, and many wielded it with remarkable skill. So this is how I start the introduction to the

Lost Cause Canon of Literature. Because there were a number of people during and after the war who were trying to write about what happened in a justifying way and saying like, well,

I want the record straight. This is what we did. We lost, but this is what we were intending. And this has been today, not just ignored, but when it is brought up, it's brought up as a subject of derision, that that's just a lost cause myth.

That's just spurious history. That's all wrong. That narrative is not just incomplete, but evil.

And I think that's what Spanberger and others are really adopting. I mean, she's from, what, New Jersey, I think, originally.

I think the guy who introduced the bill is from the North somewhere. A lot of the people in Virginia aren't Virginians, which is part of the reason.

And also, even those who are raised in these Southern areas now are getting an education from people who have been trained to reject anything related to what

I'll explain in a minute, but the truce and the quote -unquote lost cause. So the pro -Southern side of things, if you will.

So let's talk about that a little bit. Let's talk about this canon of literature. What are we talking about when we talk about the lost cause?

We're talking about vindications of the Southern cause. Basil L. Gildersleeve wrote a book,

The Creed of the Old South, in 1865. You had Albert Taylor Bledsoe writing as Davis a Traitor. Edward Pollard wrote the book,

The Lost Cause, which is where the name comes from. Robert Louis Dabney wrote A Defense of Virginia and Threw Her to the

South in 1867. Alexander Stevens released the two volumes, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the

States. He was the vice president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, the rise and fall of the Confederate government.

He was the Confederate president. And then Lieutenant Colonel J. Baz LM Curry wrote

The Southern States of the American Union in 1894. So you have this after the war period where people are writing their memoirs.

They're telling the story of what happened and they're writing down for posterity what happened so that they can also prevent lies from being adopted by their grandchildren.

Now, it hasn't worked out that way, but it really has. Those were contributions that allowed the

South to hang on to kind of a pride and not necessarily in a bad way, but an identity and understanding that their heroes were actually heroic, that they weren't the evil villains or at least as evil as they were being cast.

And so this continued for quite some time. It still continues, but it continued in a strong form, in a cultural form for quite some time.

You had the Southern Historical Society. You had the Southern Review out of Baltimore. Recently, the canon of lost cause literature has greatly expanded, making it difficult to define.

Before the war ended, two basic opposing historical graphical paradigms had already emerged. So you have the lost cause narrative where the majority of critical attention has been devoted.

And you also had this northern slave power or righteous cause narrative. And these were the two primary ways people used to describe, explain, understand the war.

And we're not going through an examination necessarily of the righteous cause, but this is kind of what we're all taught.

If we go to school in pop culture, really everywhere you go, it's the idea that the

North was there to preserve the Union, to free the slaves. They accomplished that mission. And then the both sides came together.

And at this point, I don't know that it used to be more like that was a good thing.

And the South thought valiantly. It was part of it. But this is, I think, become more a very anti -Southern viewpoint that anything about the

South is negative. And so the North is viewed in glowing terms. Now, some of the woke stuff actually was critical of this, that like the

South is bad, but, hey, the North isn't that much better. And we might get to some of that.

But most of us grew up with this sort of righteous cause understanding of the war.

University of South Carolina historian Clyde Wilson, in Defending Dixie, a 2006 book, outlines a basic history on how these divergent positions have interacted.

Throughout Reconstruction, Southerners were officially the demons of American history and the minds of Yankees for their crimes of trying to destroy the greatest nation on Earth because of their lust for slavery.

Wilson makes a separation between Yankees and those he regards as decent Northerners, like Joshua Chamberlain, who he saluted the defeated.

So he fought them, but he actually respected them. A critical period to understanding the modern historiographical situation came in the 1890s when a truce was called to which most

Northerners and Southerners subscribed in good faith. Wilson goes on to recount in a 1907 speech given by Charles Francis Adams Jr.

on the centennial of Robert E. Lee's birth called Lee the American. Southern participation in the Spanish -American

War, joint union and confederate reunions, and the charitable portrayals of both the South and Lincoln together all symbolized the truce.

And so really what you have here is people are getting older, the veterans are aging, and they want to get together and remember what happened.

They want to join even with their compatriots now who were on the other side of the conflict and they laugh, they play games.

There's all sorts of footage of this. People who were shooting at each other actually came to respect one another quite a bit.

Monuments start getting erected because we know that this generation is about to die and we want to remember them.

That's why there's monuments in the first place. How many of them say to slavery, to white supremacy?

None of them say that. They're all about to the bravery of the men who fought, those kinds of things. So this is what's going on starting really in the 1890s.

And this becomes a truce, Clyde Wilson calls it. It went something like this. Northerners agreed to stop demonizing

Southerners and to recognize that we had been brave sincere and honorable in the war, although misguided in trying to break up the union.

Northerners agreed also that the Reconstruction was a great wrong that would not have happened if Lincoln had lived. And they willingly accepted

Confederate heroes like Lee and Jackson as American heroes. So some of you, especially in the South, grew up with this, where there was a respect for Lincoln.

Now, depending on where you were, if you're in my dad's generation, you may have gotten Jefferson Davis's birthday off instead of Lincoln's birthday.

But you probably had somewhat of a respect at least. Some places you just didn't still like him.

He was bad. He was a villain. But there was a growing sentiment of, well, we should probably like him. But also, we definitely respect

Robert E. Lee. We respect Jefferson Davis. And thank God the nation's together. I mean, that was kind of the sentiment,

I think, for years. And I would have caught the last gasping breath of that when I was growing up.

That's all changed, of course. This truce held strong in general popular and civic culture up into the middle of the 20th century, at which time it started to fade.

It was completely broken by the time Wilson gave his observations in 2003. The relative new myth of the lost cause is cited by Wilson as one of the evidences of the broken agreement.

So now that it's not just the lost cause, it's the myth of the lost cause. That's how it's referred to as if there's some extra layer of untruth there, right?

And here you have some pictures. This is General Robert E. Lee on a recruitment for probably

World War II. I fought for Virginia. Now it's your turn. Join the Lee Navy volunteers.

And then here's one from World War II as well. This is the advertisement for Coca -Cola, and it portrays

Stonewall Jackson. He taught us to pause, and that is what refresh really means.

So it's Coca -Cola marketing based off of Stonewall Jackson and military service. In 1867, ghosts of the

Confederacy defeat the lost cause and the emergence of the New South. Gaines M. Foster, a historian at Louisiana State University, makes a similar observation to Clyde Wilson.

He says the election of Grover Cleveland helped convince Southerners that they had a political future with the Union, but Northern respect was needed to heal the wounds of the defeat.

In the late 70s and early 80s, a tentative rapprochement with Northern soldiers and acknowledgment in the

National Publication of Southern Heroism indicated that a few Northerners were willing to proffer such respect.

Soldiers served as key agents in reconciliation because they had developed respect for one another in the war.

So he's affirming what Clyde Wilson is saying there. By the 20th century, the lost cause position was fading as the conciliatory motif gained steam.

To put it another way, the lost cause had been absorbed into a greater American narrative. As the

South rebuilt its academic infrastructure, professional historians augmented the way history was rebranded.

By the 1930s, the term Civil War had been the major term before that.

Southerners liked more neutral terms like war between the states, but it was sort of going in a pro -North direction, right?

Foster writes, after 1913, little institutional structure survived to sustain the memory of the war.

Fewer and fewer towns put up monuments, and in the late 1920s, schoolboys in three Alabama cities cited Lincoln more often than Lee as a historical or public character after whom they wished to model themselves.

So it doesn't mean the Southern interpretation just went away. It means it was respected. It was sort of alongside this broader

American interpretation of the war, which is, I think, more so what I inherited and what

I probably was defensive of, especially in my teenage years when I started seeing some of these monuments come down.

I thought this was a terrible thing. I have a lot of family in Mississippi, and I thought these are my ancestors.

They're not taking down the Northern ones. Why are they taking down the Southern ones? Both sides fought honorably. Both have contributions to make.

And this, of course, gets you the charge of, you must be a slavery apologist, or you must be a neo -Confederate, or you must be any one of these things.

And I think, for me personally, I guess I'm speaking personally for a minute here, I think for me this wound up with me taking a more

Southern side, especially of the constitutional issues related to secession and the importance of defending oneself against an invasion.

I mean, that wasn't something the South necessarily chose. I mean, they seceded, but that doesn't merit an invasion, right? So the slavery issue was always more sticky, and this video is really not for that.

I've already done videos on this. But the slavery issue is, if I can really boil it down for a moment, it was something that had been boiling for decades along a few different fault lines.

The main one was an economic fault line, whether or not there would be slavery allowed in the Western territories.

Because if slavery was allowed, that was the Southern elite who could go there, and they would be in control of the state.

It really was overpower. Who's going to control the destiny of the state economically? Southerners had a very different view of economics.

One of the things that gets a lot of press is the tariff issue. But it was bigger than that. I mean, the Southern philosophy was things like, they don't want standing armies, right?

They're very much more for smaller government, agrarian principles, more orthodox in their

Christianity. There was just a civilizational clash. But slavery becomes a fault line for that. And in the

Postal Crisis, in the 18th, the second one in the 1850s, this just sort of reaches a fever pitch.

And there's a number of compromises and a number of things that try to alleviate this.

But eventually it winds up in the election of Abraham Lincoln. And then the Lower South says, we can't be part of this anymore.

Part of the reason they cited, and they cited more than one reason, but part of it is that he's not going to respect popular sovereignty in the

Western territories. He is going to make them free states. And if they're free states, if this is not going to allow slavery, this prohibits the

South and the Southern elites from being in these areas. That wasn't a question of whether slavery ought to end.

Slavery, the Confederate Constitution ends up outlawing slavery, as I should say, the slave trade.

Slavery itself is by the end of the Confederacy, they are offering emancipation in exchange for military service.

There were people who wanted to see it progressively end, but they needed an integration and compensation strategy. It couldn't just end without those things.

And so there was never a plan for that in the American Union. And there wasn't a way during a war to come up with a plan for that.

So this is sort of in brief what happens. The Lower South does cite this. The Upper South doesn't cite slavery at all.

They secede because there's an invasion. They don't want to live in that. And so the

South binds together. Low country and up country in places like South Carolina bind together. There's a, they all go through this together.

And there's a Southern identity that really gets, it was there before, but it gets strengthened in this particular process.

And there's still a Southern identity. There's still like a particular way of life, a slower way of life, food, religion, hospitality, it's music, it's art.

It's all kinds of things that people think of when they think of the South. And black and white, by the way.

So, you know, this, this is sort of this, these immigration patterns that contribute to that region,

Scotch Irish in the mountains, lowlands, Cavaliers, they contribute to one broad culture in this whole process.

Slavery does shape it. Obviously there's Africans who also immigrated and they brought their contributions and Eugene Genovese does a wonderful job showing all this.

But but the issue isn't so much a moral issue, although from the abolitionist perspective, the

South is evil because there's slavery there. And they want to vilify the South.

That's what the postal crisis about that's John Brown. These things, the vilification of the South, they react to, they become defensive.

They don't think they're doing anything innately wrong or sinful. Many of them are still gradual emancipationists like Robert E.

Lee. But this this does impact the the fault lines between North and South.

So there's my little spiel on how slavery pertains to this. If we had more time, we get into slave conditions and other things.

But I think that it really the takeaway from everything I just said is that there this truce that formed doesn't include those abolitionists smears on the

South. Right. It's it's really just saying slavery is done now. It's over. It ended.

And you fought valiantly. We're both glad now that it's over with. And let's come back together as a country.

We can honor Robert E. Lee. We can honor Abraham Lincoln. You had a point. We had a point and we won.

And and then let's move forward and meet new challenges because those challenges are in the past.

We got new ones coming up like Spanish -American War, World War One, World War Two and the South and the North fight alongside each other and they gain trust of each other again.

So that's the truce. That's what happens after reconstruction. The Lost Cause narrative was seen in both popular culture and academia as a valid contribution to understanding the war.

So you see, even with after the war, like the even in reconstruction, you see this with like the

Dunning School, which is, I think, more Northern. But at the time they had a different view of reconstruction than is normally portrayed now.

And this was all respected. Most modern scholarship has not looked favorably on the original Lost Cause sources, nor any of the subsequent works in the same tradition.

So people writing today like Edward Bonekemper, who wrote The Myth of the Lost Cause in 2015, refers to disappointed

Southerners aided by many other conveniently forgetful and purposely misleading comrades spending three decades after the

Civil War, creating the myth of the Lost Cause. Bonekemper asserts at the heart of the myth is the contention that the

Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. It had everything to do with it. Other facets of the myth include the idealization of slavery, adoration of Robert E.

Lee and denigration of Ulysses S. Grant and insistence that the South had no chance of winning the war, blaming James Longstreet, not

Lee, for losing the Battle of Gettysburg and condemning the North for waging total war. Now, one quick thing was the war over slavery, right?

You'll hear people say it was, it wasn't. That's a separate question from emancipation. Did the slavery issue, whether slavery was going to be in the

Western territories, primarily being the chief one, did that contribute to secession of the Lower South? Yes. Did slavery as a moral issue contribute to secession?

You don't see it in the documents. This isn't really, I would say no, not in a significant way, at least, not in a sense that you can find

Southerners who are saying that they're afraid that Northerners are going to come down and free the slaves in their own states or something.

I mean, there are things, you can find newspaper clippings and stuff that say that, but there wasn't like a, let's go to war or let's see, let's get out of the country for a non -legal matter that relates to slavery is a morally good thing in a technical sense, in a universal sense.

And because the North doesn't agree with slavery, we're going to, we have to leave.

I mean, you look at the Corwin Amendment, which was the other 13th Amendment, the one that would have been passed.

And really this would have enshrined slavery. And Lincoln was willing to even do that. There's a lot of good historical evidence along these lines.

So it wasn't so much about that. It was really the question about the war itself, which is, that's the main question.

What was this war about, right? Is why did Lincoln invade? Why did the North invade? What was their motivation? That's really where you can see the reason for the war.

You can read Lincoln's first inaugural, and I think it's pretty clear what the reason was, at least from his perspective.

But this is something that if you say the war wasn't about slavery, then apparently

Bone Kemper says, oh, it was all about slavery. Well, you have to make some jumps to get there is what I'm trying to say. Like you assume some things when you make that kind of a statement.

I'm not saying it's a crazy statement, by the way. Like there's, when you say the war is about slavery, the next question is in what sense?

And then have a reasonable discussion about it. But someone can say both statements and mean different things.

If you mean the war itself and not secession and say it's not about slavery, it was about a right of a state to secede or something like that, then that's actually not technically incorrect.

Anyhow, modern academics consensus is that a minimization or rejection of slavery as an issue motivated the conflict spawned and spawned the lost cause.

William C. Davis believes that the creators of the lost cause myth sought to distance themselves from slavery.

Charles Dew, who teaches at Williams College and authored a 2002 bestseller, Apostles of Disunion, often cited as discrediting the pro -Southern narrative.

Dew accuses Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stevens of concealing their true intentions by conspiring to avoid discussing the issue of slavery as a cause after the war, instead opting to write from the ashes of the

Confederate defeat, a passionate insistence that states rights and states rights alone lay at the root of the recent conflict.

Dew's assertion is a good example of how lost cause authors are reinterpreted as historical innovators.

In other words, these guys like Gallagher and Bonekemper and Charles Dew and these people come along as historians and they say, this was something after the fact that Southerners invented.

They needed a reason for what they just did. They knew it was wrong. So they came up with these righteous reasons to try to downplay the real reason, which is they wanted to keep people in subjugation.

We're going to challenge this a little bit, but this is the modern narrative of the lost cause and why they don't, people in historical departments across the country don't like it.

It is true that in the rise and fall, Jefferson Davis cited concerning the reason for the war, the denial of the right of the state to peaceably withdraw.

Included in this discussion was the presence and reinforcement of military fortifications in the seceded state, as well as Lincoln's call for troops.

Davis leaves slavery for his discussion of secession. Unlike Davis, Dew implicitly assumes the war was the inevitable result of secession.

This connection, neither Davis nor the lost cause authors ever assumed. Davis further distinguished between the question of slavery serving as an occasion for secession and the question of slavery serving as a cause for secession.

Dew, like many other contemporaries, simply assumes preserving slavery was the cause. One further distinction

Davis adduced was between slavery as a political question and slavery as a moral question. Davis denied that any moral nor sentimental consideration were really involved in either the earlier or later controversies, which so long agitated and finally ruptured the union.

Edward Pollard in the Lost Cause made the same distinctions. The slavery question is not to be taken as an independent controversy in American politics.

It was not a moral dispute. It was the mere incident of a sectional animosity, the causes of which lay far beyond the domain of morals.

Slavery furnished a convenient lie, a battle between the disputants. It was the most prominent ground of distinction between the two sections.

It was therefore naturally seized upon as a subject of controversy, became the dominant theater of hostilities, and was at last so conspicuous and violent that occasion was mistaken for cause.

And that was merely an incident that came to be regarded as the main subject of the controversy.

Choosing by default to view slavery as a moral question, Dew rhetorically asks if secession and racism are intimately connected.

This has become the standard view in both academic and popular circles. So what

I'm describing there is the fact that this was not just after the war.

It was also during the war. You had people already trying to correct the record.

And the correction is basically that slavery may have been an occasion for conflict, but it was not the cause of the conflict itself.

In other words, there were a myriad of civilizational issues between North and South that had been brewing, and the slavery gave the

North a moral legitimacy later on. So if you want to talk about later, I mean, this was really after the

Emancipation Proclamation that now the war is about related to, in some way, freeing slaves that are in the

South, but it didn't start out that way. And that wasn't the understanding at the outset. So this becomes a moral garb, but that the moral question of slavery was not the cause.

And so I'm trying to think of an example of distinguishing between cause and occasion for a conflict.

I mean, when you have a fight with your significant other, wife, husband, whatever, let's say you have a disagreement over something and you're torqued, like a number of things have got you going.

And then sometimes the stupidest thing can become the reason. I'm not saying slavery's stupid, by the way, but sometimes there's something that happens, like he left the toilet seat up and it just becomes like you're railing each other.

It's like, is that really the thing that is behind all of this? And counselors have to get to the bottom of it.

That's what the lost cause people are saying. They're saying, look, they're using this, they're saying this, but that's not the reason that we left the union.

It's not a moral issue. And it's as a moral issue. And it's not the reason we certainly fought the war. And it's not the reason most of the

Confederate soldiers fought the war who never owned slaves and didn't have a hope of owning them or holding them.

So that's my interpretation of what they're saying. In academic circles, the term lost cause had by the end of the 20th century evolved into something of a pejorative, often becoming inextricably linked with the word myth.

In 1973, Yale University historian Roland Osterweiss published the myth of the lost cause, which signaled to many academics that it should not be treated as a serious theory about the war.

Bonekepper describes the myth as a collection of fictions, lies, and components that purport to explain why much of the

South seceded from the union and why the Confederacy lost the war. He goes on to assert that after Appomattox, the myth came to dominate the historiography of the

Civil War for most of the next 150 years. Now, that's kind of interesting that he says most of it. So like you have this defeated country that lost a war, and now they've somehow foisted their interpretation of that war from their poverty position on the much richer

North. Like, it doesn't make any sense, but this is like what they're saying. They're saying the South influenced the academy, it influenced pop culture, and like the

North just couldn't do anything about it, I guess. I don't know. To be clear, the employment of the term myth represents more of an academic condescension than it does an exhaustive affirmation that the narrative contains no truth value whatsoever.

Osterweiss himself said that it represented the postbellum adjustment of the old chivalric concepts and the old idea of Southern cultural nationalism to the traumatic experience of devastation, defeat, poverty, and humiliation.

The lost cause, Osterweiss explains, despite its shadowy basis in empirical fact, was a romantic legend advanced in literature for the purpose of granting the

South an identity to take pride in while simultaneously reshaping political and social realities. In the 2000 book,

The Myth of the Lost Cause in Civil War History, Unidiversity of Virginia historian Gary Gallagher asserts that a myth is not to be confused with a falsehood.

Myths, Gallagher claims, arise when the people draw on images and symbols to construct a usable truth, which in turn permits them to deal with traumatic events such as the

Confederacy's defeat. Thus, many modern professional historians see the lost cause as a symbolic truth rather than an objective truth while opposing its influence in the culture at large.

There is an especially aggressive attempt to fence it away from the ivory towers of academia.

The idea is that it may have served a purpose for 150 years, often at the expense of national unity and minority rights, but it is now time to retire the legend and, like other myths, cease retelling it until it too is gone with the wind.

So a myth in this conception is almost like a coping mechanism. It's the story you tell yourself to get through a hard time, to draw inspiration from.

It's not necessarily true or false. It's like not operating on that level. It's operating on this more emotional level.

But at the same time, it doesn't have to be accurate in the actual factual level.

It doesn't actually have to comport to reality as it is. So that's a little bit about what myth means to them.

But they don't say that the myth of the northern view or anything like that, obviously.

Okay, so here's a new part of the essay, the vindication motive. And this is a section where I'm going to talk a little bit about the original reason for the lost cause.

Was it really just about trying to give the South a myth to hold on to, or were they actually trying to deal with actual facts?

And the answer is the latter. Patrick Claiborne's concern in 1864 was not over whether or not

Southern children would be deprived of a symbolic symbol or legend by which to cope with the inevitable depressing circumstances of defeat.

Nor was Claiborne worried about Blacks gaining civil rights. His own feelings before were in favor of emancipation.

So he actually wanted the slaves freed. Claiborne's fear was that the historical record would be compromised by a northern version of events having the lasting effect of dishonoring the

Confederate debt. He was not alone in this sentiment. While the war was raging in 1862, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, a

West Point graduate and former Episcopalian minister, lawyer, and previous chair of the mathematics and astronomy department at Ole Miss, wrote

Fall of the American Union. In it, he argued that slavery was not the root of Southern independence.

The difference between the North and South was as deep as the foundations of a society itself and as universal as the interests of humanity.

He believed Northern vilification of the South eventually caused the conflict. It is worth noticing that while most modern academic treatments of the lost cause claim that it was not until after the war that Southerners distanced their cause from the perpetuation of slavery,

Fall of the American Union, a portion of which appeared in the Army and Navy Messenger in 1863, is one example that such opinion was already part of the

Southern intellectual thought. So let me just, I'm going to get to more important stuff about Bledsoe because he's a very important figure that is so often ignored in all of this.

But the point that I'm trying to make is, and that I'm trying to show you, I should say, that they're trying to make, but I'm trying to show you is that this idea that they were being vilified by the

North predates the war. It's during the war. Slavery becomes part of this. It's after the war.

It's today. And this is one way to look at this conflict as a continuation. It's like one battle in a broader war that we still have with us, where more traditional regions of the country, mostly in the

South, the Bible Belt, are vilified by the coastal cities. And this is because of immigration patterns, differences of the way that people want to live and the way they view reality and religion, all kinds of issues that distinguish them.

But that is one way to look at this, that this didn't just pop out of a vacuum. There had already been a schism.

I mean, we talked about John C. Calhoun in the Patreon conservative book series that I'm doing.

And the next one, by the way, is going to be on Jefferson Davis. So if you want to take advantage of that, then sign up for Patreon.

Go to patreon .com forward slash John Harris podcast or go to Substack.

I think it's just johnharris .substack .com. And if you become a member, then you'll get access to that as well.

But this was happening before there was ever a war. There was friction between these two sides.

And it's something that I think often goes unnoticed because we start the clock in 1860 or sometimes 1850.

It's like you just sort of drop in and there's these border states and slave states and free states, and it's all about the compromises between them without going back further.

Well, why were there differences between these states? Is it just that one state chose to own slaves, hold slaves, and one state chose not to?

Is it something broader? Is there an agrarian or an economic interest that's at play here?

In what sense? Are they pro -slavery in a universal way or do they want to end it? I mean, there were more in 1830, there would have been more abolition societies in the south than the north.

So what changed? What happened? You have things, even go back to, I talked about this in the

Calhoun thing, the war of 1812 and how that divided the country. And the south at that time was primarily composed of people who were more war hawks.

The people who were against the national bank were in the south. They were also in the Midwest, but they were primarily the source of power was the south.

The people who wanted the American system, the national banks, they were in the northeast. So there was a number of these issues and the north had tried to secede a number of times, or at least discussed the possibility of secession, most notably in the

Hartford Convention. And so this is a battle that's already there.

George Washington was even in his farewell address trying to say, look, guys, there's only shades of difference between you.

Please try to come together. But alas, these regions of the country are just different and they're still just different.

It hasn't changed in that respect. Other than immigration patterns and so forth have sort of just have taken the influence of the south and diluted it.

But that's happened in the north to some extent, too. At the encouragement of Jefferson Davis, blood, so Albert Taylor blood, so ran the blockade to England in 1863 and began writing perhaps the most important historical piece of lost cost literature.

Is Davis a traitor or was secession a constitutional right previous to the war of 1861? This is so important, guys.

Robert E. Lee in 1865 said of this doctor, you must take of yourself, take care of yourself.

You have a great work to do. We shall look upon you for our vindication. Now, why would Lee say this to Albert Taylor blood?

So because Albert Taylor blood, so would have been the one, the lawyer defending

Jefferson Davis. If Davis went to court for this, there remember he was in prison. There was a chance that if he went to court, what if the

Supreme Court said, well, they had a right to secede. It's constitutional. The whole thing would have been undone.

He never went to trial. And I think he was hoping for it. And if they got their day in court blood, so would have presented the case and eventually got published as this book.

It never saw its day in court, but I have read it and it is a pretty strong, it's stronger than you would think.

Like it is a, it actually reads a little bit like the new views of the constitution by John Taylor, Carol or John Randolph rather.

So anyway, so Robert Lee says this Davis is in prison at Fort Monroe.

He doesn't go to trial. So the work gets published in Baltimore blood. So would go on in 1867 to establish the

Southern review in Baltimore. And that magazine was intended to justify the Southern cause. Interestingly, other than a few passing comments from strong anti -loss cause historians, such as David Blight and Charles Reagan Wilson, there is not a lot of information on the significance of Albert Taylor bled.

So, so this is a curious thing to me, like the guys who really hate the lost cause so much, they don't focus on this.

And this is probably for legal purposes. Certainly the most important document in the lost cause literature, and they don't talk about it.

And it's just, it is a very odd thing. If you think about it, why is that ignored? But that is probably the most important document.

Now, recently professional historical consensus has drastically shifted on the extent to which the

Southern view has influenced American culture. Instead of seeing the cultural truce between North and South for what it is, the truth is itself apparently now viewed as part of the lost cause.

Alan T. Nolan Gallagher's coauthor in the myth of lost cause and civil war history defines the truce between the North and South forged in the 1880s as an expression of the lost cause itself.

After stating the political legacy of the lost cause facilitated the reunification of the North and South. Nolan goes on to say the virulent racism that the

North shared with the South, in spite of Northern antislavery views was a premise of the lost cause and the principal engine of the

North acceptance of it. The reunion was exclusively a white man's phenomenon. And the price of the reunion was the sacrifice of the

African Americans. So you start to see this new version. This is like a woke era version of interpreting the war that I explained this earlier.

The South is, is, is bad. It's like really bad. The North is also bad though. And so both of these sides are just wrong.

And the good guys and the whole conflict are the slaves. And, and so everything needs to be interpreted from that perspective.

Now, of course, you're not going around ripping down Northern monuments, right? So the South is still ultra vilified in this, but the

North is also vilified because they have shared racially superior views of white people or something.

So this is, this is not true though, by the way, I don't think I'm just going to say, this is not true. I don't think this is true at all.

That like, there's the North adopted the lost cause because they had some shared version of, they, they also believed in racism and the

South did. And so they, you know, they, they, they, that doesn't mean like, if that's true, why didn't it go the other way?

Right. Like, why didn't the South just adopt all the North's view about the war? Because after all, if they have this shared view and the

North is more dominant and the North is the one sending in the military to subjugate the South and sending in money from Rockefellers to build schools and things and libraries and sending in teachers from the

North and why, why aren't they the ones having the cultural impact? It's a very odd kind of thing.

It's not like people were somehow chained up and like forced to read gone with the wind.

Like Northerners are the ones who willingly bought that book. They're the ones that had the money to make it the best seller it was.

And even by 1930s to go to the movie and see it. So it's just not true. I don't think,

I think that's ridiculous. But at this point there's an important assumption that is made by current historians to them.

The lost cause is now intrinsically tied to white supremacy, which oddly enough is a feature that already existed in the

North. And if this premise is accepted, it begs the question, what significant factor can the lost cause narratives possibly offer them?

In addition to what already existed on both sides, it would seem that the constitutional interpretation of particular

Southern cultural stories would be the only relevant contribution. So in other words, I'm saying there's kind of a contradiction here.

If you think it's like all about racism, white supremacy and the North had that, then why is there even a need for it?

Right? Like, what is it that the South is trying to prove then in that case? Like why? And I don't think it had, it makes sense.

I don't think they thought about it, but this is precisely how the list of lost cause proponents invariably widens to include fiction writers.

Now let me give you some names here. Thomas Nelson Page, James Dixon, Joel Chandler Harris, Walt Disney, and Margaret Mitchell are apparently now included under this new interpretation in a lost cause because they depicted the antebellum

South, including slave conditions in a positive light. William C. Davis goes after Gone with the

Wind in his book, The Cause Lost. It's a 1996 book. He says it's distorted. It's mostly fictitious.

Moonlight and Magnolia's Portrait of the Old South and Confederacy. He says mortals like Stonewall Jackson have been metamorphosed into demigods.

So changed is really the word there, the meaning. And I put a picture here of like just cultural sample.

Like here's on the left, the Mid -City Parade in New Orleans, 1966. There's a soldier in the

Korean War in the center. And there's Johnny Cash on the Muppet show in, I think, probably the early 90s, early 80s. And just showing you like, look, like Southern symbols weren't persona non grata.

Like they weren't, there wasn't anything controversial about it up until very recently.

But this is what the modern historians are saying. They're saying that was the lost cause, making everyone adopt the

Southern perspective. When in reality, I think it's probably more just the truce. It's just more

Southerners have their symbols and their identity, and it doesn't threaten us anymore. And we've come together as a country, and we can appreciate them.

And that's basically it. Like that doesn't necessarily mean just because on a TV show, someone has a

Confederate symbol, or wears a uniform or whatever, that they're now just endorsing the full bore, everything lost cause writers in the

Reconstruction era were saying. All it means is they have a cultural affinity. And these are symbols of that. They're identity markers of that.

But this is now, you can't have that anymore, right? This is a threat. So Davis takes it upon himself to present a more realistic rendition of some of the

Confederacy's heroes as William Davis. All right, so realistic in his mind. Devoting an entire chapter to demythologizing

Stonewall Jackson. So here, this is actually hysterical to me. I read this book and Stonewall Jackson, if you know anything about him, what do you know about him?

He's brave. He's pious. He's disciplined. He's quirky.

There's Jackson standing like a Stonewall rally around the Virginians boys. I mean, that's your

Stonewall Jackson. What does William C. Davis have a problem with? Is it that stuff?

He says, people don't know. Stonewall Jackson was a hypochondriac. Now, if that's true,

Stonewall Jackson's a hypochondriac. How did he get through a dirty war? That makes his myth grow bigger.

That makes his legend grow bigger. But he thinks this is somehow like slighting Stonewall Jackson. He also says that he didn't like lemons the way that people remember him.

So Stonewall Jackson's remembered as someone who would like to eat lemons. Well, he didn't like lemons all that much.

Oh, wow. You've really ruined the image of Stonewall Jackson for people. They'll be so disappointed finding out he might not have liked lemons as much.

So, I mean, it's just silly stuff. Alan T. Nolan considers Nathan Bedford Forrest to be a strange fellow, a strange hero,

I should say, describing him as looking on his troops as they helped massacre Black soldiers at Fort Pillow after they had surrendered and then joining to become a prominent member of the

Ku Klux Klan. Actually, I think other sources say he formed the Ku Klux Klan. Nolan leaves out the question of conflicting testimony in the incident.

So Fort Pillow is not a clear -cut case. We don't have a historical source that links

Nathan Bedford Forrest to the incident in such a way that he was approving of and seeing what was happening there.

The other thing is there's no mention made of Forrest's slaves who were

Confederate cavalrymen. Some of the best riders and cavalrymen in the whole entire Confederate Army were the slaves of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

And he granted them freedom. They committed to him after the war. And his reputation as a charitable employer to former slaves after emancipation was great.

The Forrest responsible for disbanding the first Klan, so he also gave the order to disband the Klan, he disavowed any subsequent entities claiming to be part of the organization.

He, Nolan offers no trace of the Nathan Bedford Forrest who kissed Lou Lewis, a black woman, after giving a speech in support of an early civil rights group in Memphis in 1875.

So you want to ruin Nathan Bedford Forrest, but you just ignore all these other things about Nathan Bedford Forrest. It's also like you have to take the full picture and come up with a paradigm that makes sense of all of it.

More significantly, the character of Robert E. Lee has been the subject of much scrutiny since the publication of The Marvel Man in 1977, by South Carolina state historian

Thomas Connelly. Connelly took it upon himself to psychologically analyze Lee and to the extent he, to an extent, he credits those he credits, sorry, with giving him legendary status.

So the people who have sort of made Lee a hero, he puts them under the microscope, such as Douglas Southall Freeman, who wrote the gold standard on this, which

I have right here. Here's volume four of it. Really good friend of mine gave these to me, which

I was like, that is such a steal. But yeah, that's a four volume thing.

So he takes him to task kind of, and it went to Pulitzer Prize, by the way, the

Douglas Southall Freeman four volume. Connelly claims that inner loneliness and a repression of the vibrant spirit was basic to his nature in opposition to the vast majority of secondary sources on the general

Connelly asserts that Lee could also show a savage temper, which caused Connelly to invoke

Sigmund Freud's death instinct, which related aggressor behavior to inner guilt.

All right, so he's thinking Freud and he's trying to figure Lee out. In 2007, Elizabeth Brown Pryor published a book called

Reading the Man about Lee. And she gives an even less gentle picture. She introduces

Lee as someone who had broken up every slave family on his estate, regularly beat his slaves, captured free blacks in Pennsylvania in order to enslave them in Virginia and possibly turned a blind eye to attempted lynchings administered by members of the student body when he was president of Washington and Lee College.

Many of Pryor's conclusions are based upon historical inferences or questionable sources such as Wesley Norris' letter, which abolitionists took this kind of thing at the time, but people didn't believe it.

But now it's being regurgitated and this must be true. Pryor even goes so far as to make references to a hypothetical case of foot fetishism, a theory she found in the journalist

Roy Blout's 2003 publication, Robert E. Lee in the appendix entitled Speculation.

Like Connolly, Blout imposes psychological assumptions upon the historical record because of Robert's father,

Harry Lee's relational shortcomings. Robert fit the description of a child who had repressions and childhood pain of having to serve as mothers of their own mothers.

I mean, this gets so ridiculous. Lee loved foot massages and in Lee's culture, feet were highly eroticized.

Lee's frequent mentions of socks in letters to his wife, along with the ease he exhibited around women renders Lee's sexuality less gender specific than that of his role model,

George Washington. Lee's complimentary remarks towards other women, which were no issue or secret to his wife,

Blout refers to as crushes. So I guess he's gay now or homosexual. The author also asserts that many men also seem to have a kind of platonic crush on him.

According to this bizarre interpretation, Lee's self -restraint in the face of his desires were the result of his mother's preachments and his daddy, his father's bad example.

So Elizabeth Brown Friar is like bringing in a total deconstruction of Robert E.

Lee, which, I mean, you could just destroy anyone like just reading into everything. I think people who aren't necessarily that impressive or know they don't have real hangups themselves.

They try to target men who they feel insecure around. Men and women do this,

I think. I think men probably do this a little more, but well, I don't know, like women do it too.

I don't wanna say men do it more, but I've noticed this tendency that guys who just like, they have maybe their life has been a train wreck or they've made really poor decisions.

They've embarrassed themselves. They have moral shortcomings, whatever the case may be.

Like they can often become, especially on the internet, like really sort of vindictive, passive aggressive, effeminate types who like to just sort of rip down people that are like more,

I don't know, make them feel insecure, I don't know. Now, am I psychologizing now?

I've seen that up close and personal with some guys. Like it takes a while to figure out that that's what's going on, but I don't wanna say that's the case in every circumstance.

But I do think that is a tendency. Like we wanna just put other people down and make ourselves feel good.

And when someone like Robert E. Lee comes along, it's like, man, that guy had such self -control, no demerits at West Point, was so honorable even in defeat.

How in the world do we compare? Like we don't, we don't measure up. And so let's rip him down.

Let's show that he's not the man that people remember him to be. And maybe, I don't know, I can't help but think, why would you put effort into like analyzing his socks?

Like what motivates that, right? So, yeah.

Robert E. Lee has weathered more criticism in the last 10 years than any other Confederate hero. Washington Post opinion writer,

Eric Lamar, calls him a traitor. Adam Sewer, who used Pryor's reading the man as his main source, wrote in the

Atlantic, a piece that Lee was devoted to defending the principles of white supremacy. Biographies produced by historians are generally careful to include the story of Lee's allegiances to Virginia and reluctant to fight the

Union as well, as a general sympathetic attitude towards slaves and emancipation with the possible exception of Pryor.

Nevertheless, recent historical retellings have been used by the opponents of Lee's image to tarnish the general. Though new academic approaches, such as psychoanalysis have birthed new perspectives, many of Lee's detractors are actually repeating accusations as old as the man himself.

While it would be possible to eulogize the general use exclusively Northern sources contemporary with him, it would also be possible to vilify him.

So in other words, you go back in the historical record, you can find people that hated Robert E. Lee who were fighting him in the war and just try to resurrect something they said about him, right?

But that doesn't make it true. Though not a biography, historian John Reeves' 2018 book, The Lost Indictment of Robert E.

Lee, The Forgotten Case Against an American Icon, goes farther than any historian has in attempting to make the treason charge stick to Lee.

Reeves uses the original source material, such as the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, which led the way among the newspapers in making the case that Lee be tried and punished for treason.

It should come as no surprise that Lee's image is faltering in popular culture. So they're going to the New York Times from when the wounds of the war were fresh and they're saying, the

New York Times is saying he should be tried for treason. So let's just take everything the New York Times says and just that's the gold standard now.

We'll believe that, right? That's not really what a historian should do, but that's what they're doing. Alan T. Nolan argues, the lost cause is a character of the truth when the war was actually a rebellion against the constitution.

So we're leaving Lee, now we're talking about the lost cause more broadly. In which rich planters seceded in an order to protect the inhumane system of slavery, occupying land that was not theirs and attacking

Fort Sumter, thus starting the war. Lincoln defended the United States with skill and success.

Nolan's goal is to start again by putting away distortions, falsehoods and romantic sentimentality of the myth of the lost cause.

Nolan's view has progressively come into vogue within the past 40 years in most academic institutions.

Of course, this interpretation would require the presupposition that Northerners have viciously defeated the South in a costly war, were blinded enough by their own racism to the point of being duped by their recent enemy into conceding the moral high ground all at the time when they were economically, politically and socially more influential than the

South. That is what the truce apparently represents. The dawning of a woke era historiography vilifies the

South even more. So I'm already sort of dipping into the woke era stuff because this is sort of new left stuff.

It's hard to distinguish when does the woke era stuff start? I don't know, 2015. But I think the issue here and the point

I'm trying to make, the reason I'm giving you all this information is to let you know that there is this truce that is now being cast as the lost cause, that this is a pro -Confederate, pro -slavery, really behind it all is a pro -racism position of some kind.

It's white supremacy. And if you peel all the onion layers back, if you peel all the onion layers back to Walt Disney's The Song of the

South, you're gonna get a bunch of white supremacy. That's the issue here that they're trying to tell you.

And they have to explain because it's hard to explain it. Well, the North adopted all of this. The North saw this as all positive stuff.

They read Gone with the Wind. They watched Dukes of Hazzard, right? They're listening to Bo Seifus and going to Lynyrd Skynyrd concerts too.

They're going to NASCAR events. They're participating in all of this stuff. They're waving

Southern symbols in World War II, in Vietnam. Pop culture shows, comedies and stuff are giving positive portrayals.

Even in the Christian world, you have all kinds of guys from R .C. Sproul to John MacArthur to the founder of Campus Crusade.

And they're all saying positive things about Robert E. Lee. So like, what do we do with all that? The North and the broader

American culture, they've all kind of, they've been suckered into this. How can we somehow explain it?

And the explanation is, well, the South from their poverty stricken fields decided to dupe us somehow.

It's like, I think they were busy trying to survive, but that's what you'd inevitably,

I think, have to conclude. In Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, the ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, Columbia University historian,

Eric Foner, he's basically a Marxist, observes that before the Civil War, both North and South viewed their own societies fundamentally well -ordered and the other as both a negation of its most cherished values and the threat to its existence.

Foner goes on to state this, at the center of the Republican ideology was the notion of free labor. This concept involved not merely an attitude towards work, but just a justification of antebellum

Northern society. And it led Northern Republicans to an extensive critique of Southern society, which appeared both different from an inferior to their own.

They had seized control of the federal government and were attempting to perfect the constitution for its own purpose.

In this narrative, Southern political objectives were always connected with the motivations of the slave power.

So what Alan, so this is Eric Foner's view of it is important. He mentions the

Free Soil Movement because the Free Soil Movement wasn't just like we're anti -slavery because of moral apprehensions.

The Free Soil Movement was we are against competition to free white labor. We don't want any Blacks around. Look at the laws they passed in the

Western states to keep Black people from living in those states to deny civil rights.

They wanted these areas for white people. If you want to talk about white supremacy, this is basically a movement that has that as a feature.

And it's actually that feature that in the Lower South, they're objecting to in their secession documents too, because this is the feature that is preventing slavery from being extended, quote unquote.

It's not like extended in the sense of the enumeration is changing because there's no enumeration changing. There's a possibility of rich Southerners who have influence moving into these areas with slaves that they hold.

Now, if that makes it more complicated for you, good, you know, welcome to history.

Welcome to, you know, you want to talk about World War One or World War Two or more complicated conflicts that have more moving parts.

This is just sort of the nature of history and conflicts. It's not always Black hat, white hat in every single way that we come to believe those things.

There's obviously good guys and bad guys, but when you get into the granular detail, sometimes the good guys aren't always as good.

The bad guys aren't always as bad. Sometimes you find really good guys in places you didn't expect to find them.

That's why history is kind of fun too, to be honest with you. So Alan T. Nolan calls this lost cause.

Yale University historian David Blight refers to it as the forces of reconciliation, which defeated the emancipationist vision and embodies in the

African -Americans complex remembrance of their own freedom and the politics of radical reconstruction and in the conceptions of the war as the reinvention of the

Republic and the liberation of Blacks to citizenship and constitutional equality. The persistence of the neo -abolitionist tradition, according to Blight, made the revival of the emancipationist memory of the war and the transformation of American society possible in the last third of the 20th century.

This modern narrative does not see itself as an inexplicable triumph of objective historical truth over the myth of a lost cause.

Instead, the slave power narrative with its own historical reinvention and prioritization of equality defeated the conciliatory truce.

No new discovery leading to such a seismic upheaval in civil war interpretation has come to light. Instead, a cultural paradigm shift took place, which favored an alleged old interpretation, abolitionism, of old facts.

Okay, so we're going to leave this section, I think, which was titled The Deconstructing the

South. And we're going to enter a new section, which is the end, the final part, which is why the lost cause persists.

But to just sort of put a bow on the last section, this deconstruction, and especially as David Blight explains it, is a memory studies project.

Meaning memory studies is the approach to history that is more postmodern.

It looks at history as competing memories or interpretations from various social groups.

And so if you're the oppressed social group, in this case, if you're black people who are the descendants of slaves, then your particular understanding of this should be platformed more than the interpretations of others in the case.

So this is an interesting thing, because in this particular scheme, the southerners who you would think would be the, and I should say the, it's complicated, the white southerners, but also there are black people who fought alongside them and supported them in some ways.

So it's not quite as simple as just saying white southerners. But the former confederates will say they should be viewed, you would think, with sort of this perception of social inferiority,

I suppose, like they didn't have the same kind of privilege that the northerners had. So shouldn't we listen to them more in a woke model?

But that's the thing you're not understanding, right? Because in memory studies, you go back and you find the most oppressed group.

That's the, in the way at least David Blight does it, that's the black people who are descendants of slaves.

How do they remember this particular conflict? And oftentimes it's not going to, it's not going to like Earl Imes.

It's not going to, I'm trying to think what's the guy's name. He just died. Black guy who was always waving the

Confederate flag around and marched across the South. What's his name? I can't remember his name. Is it

Eddington or something? I forget his name, but you're not going to those people. You're going to, you're not going to Holt Collier.

You're going to instead go to modern groups that are usually civil rights leaders in leftist causes and so forth.

And like, what do they think about this? That becomes your reinterpretation. And so the

South is the prime oppressor because in this paradigm, the South oppressed them. But then the

North also doesn't get a pass the North didn't treat them well in during reconstruction. And the

North didn't go far enough. And the North also was part of the slave trade initially and brought slaves to the country in the first place, allowed it, all of that.

So this becomes part of like the new woke era way of looking at this whole conflict.

Now, why the lost cause persists. The Academy's rejection of both the conciliatory and lost cause paradigms in favor of the slave power narrative has not made southern interpretation cease to exist.

Modern retellings of the lost cause highlight areas. These academics have ignored or inadequately explained.

So give you some examples of modern people that are taking a more critical or not critical of the

North, but pro Southern side. Marshall DeRosa, a constitutional law professor at Florida Atlantic University, has penned two favorable studies on the

Confederate Constitution and one favorable book on Robert E. Lee. Loyola, Loyola University economist,

Thomas DiLorenzo has authored three books, critical of Abraham Lincoln. The Kennedy brothers continue to produce popular level books on the

Confederacy, slavery, reconstruction, and what they call the War of Northern Aggression, including an edited reprint of William Rawls, A View of the

Constitution. Karen Stokes, an archivist at the South Carolina Historical Society, has published numerous works from Southern fiction to compilations of primary historical accounts on Sherman's atrocities and war experiences.

And I'll add to this, Zachary Garris and Sean McGowan, they're writing a book on Presbyterian, Southern Presbyterians.

I don't know if they classify it as like a lost cause endeavor, but it'll probably be framed that way from people who don't like it, because they're going to try to tell the truth about that era of history and bring in all the sources we have available and not view the

Southerners as just zombie, evil, Nazi types or something, which is how they're often viewed in the academic halls of academia.

Many authors, often with pen names or formal training in fields other than history, have self -published or published with Shotwell, whose goal, among other things, is to keep the lost cause alive.

Formal historians, such as Clyde Wilson and Brian McClanahan, have gone around academic establishments in recent years, finding favorable reception in outlets like the

Abbeville Institute and Confederate Veteran. As long as people ask questions, like why did the Confederate Constitution outlaw the slave trade?

Why were there free Blacks who fought for the Confederacy? Or why did the vast majority of non -slaving Southerners fight? There will always be a demand for lost cause explanations.

How are modern students of history to grapple with the slave narrative, census records, and foreign observations regarding slavery that do not fit the general narrative?

Less than egalitarian views on race held by Northerners, including Lincoln, on primary sources that tell a different story concerning Northern political motives for invasion.

So how do you grapple with all this? That's why you're going to still have people sharing a Southern perspective on this, because in the

Southern perspective provides some answers to some of these questions. In some ways,

Patrick Claiborne's concern, and by the way, not all of it is a Southern perspective, I should say. I mean, there were people in the

North who, not just Copperheads even, just people who, you know, were able to see the reasons for why there was an invasion, why there was a war, that kind of thing.

It's not, it just became the Southerners who were more committed to remembering that sort of thing. In some ways,

Patrick Claiborne's concern that Southern children would learn the Northern version of the war to the point of regarding Confederate soldiers as fit subjects for derision has taken place even in many parts of the

South. However, in small towns and rural areas, the Confederate ghost, the moonlight and magnolias, and indeed the myth of the lost cause still continues to endure.

Or is it all just a myth? Jefferson Davis is said to have remarked after the war, truth crushed to the earth is still truth and like a seed will rise again.

Perhaps that seed will find its soil in American hearts that respect the contributions of brave soldiers from all sections of the country.

There is no serious talk of returning to chattel slavery, nor should there be. And by the way, let me emphasize that for people who might take issue with this.

Nor should there be. And if I had lived back then, I would have probably been a gradual emancipationist. I would have wanted to see this end in the most humanitarian way possible.

I have no love for it. This is sort of the tragedy is anyone who tries to tell this story and tell it accurately gets labeled with these smears that aren't accurate, that aren't right.

And so I think it's worth saying that. There's no one

I would support who would favor a return to that or think that's a justified condition to have continued.

This was something inherited and it's something that should have been ended. And it was ended in probably the worst way possible, unfortunately, because about a million slaves starved, died.

It's poisoned race relations to this day to some extent. But I think it's still worth respecting kind of like everyone who was involved in this conflict from the slaves, the soldiers,

North, South, American, Native Americans who fought, like all of these different groups had their reasons for how they thought at the time about it.

And their children are still with us and we should respect all of them, which means handling their stories accurately.

That's the first thing in respecting. So to continue on, there's no serious talk about that, but there is an ongoing discussion about how to interpret the constitution, how to conceive of the federal public and how to recover the meanings of identity, virtue and loyalty.

Because of these questions, the lost cause is still likely to endure for years to come. And so there you go. There's my contribution to lost cause historiography.

I hope that was helpful to you and gives you some perspective on why the governor of Virginia is doing what she's doing now.

She's adopting a particular understanding of this conflict. And I think as Christians, especially we should recognize there were men who were

Christians on both sides of this conflict. But some of the Southern men who were derided the most, I mean, they were not deriding

Northerners as much. Some of the men like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee were very committed Christians. And they did try to live out their

Christianity in ways that I find truly remarkable and inspirational. Like even when it comes to things like slavery, they were both very committed to ending the practice.

Stonewall Jackson taught a Sunday school of gay theological training, even against the law at that point to train pastors who would go out to the slave communities and preach the

Bible. Robert E. Lee was a very upstanding man. They said that you would see his anger rise to his neck and no farther.

He didn't let it get to his mouth. He was the kind of guy who could have been the run for president, gotten money from banks that wanted to use his image.

Instead, he went to Lee College. Now it's Washington College. Now it's Washington and Lee and tried to restore the virtue of the young men who would make the leaders of the

South. And that's something that I've taken to heart. I see myself more and more as someone who wants to restore virtue because we've lost it.

And that's what Robert E. Lee wanted to do, is to restore a leadership class that maintained the kind of gentlemanly behavior that you find in books like this,

Rules and Civility and Decent Behavior of George Washington, because Washington was Lee's hero. So hopefully that helps you.

You may not agree with everything that I said, and I'm not even sure I agree with every, I certainly don't agree with every single thing that isn't like a lost cause source.

But I do think to come up with a paradigm that makes sense of all the moving parts, you have to consider the

Southern perspective on these things. It does offer some answers that I don't think these other views that are popular now necessarily offer.

So God bless. Hope that was helpful. And you can leave your comments in the comment section if you disagree or agree or feel free to share this.