“The Confederacy Is Dead; Long Live the Confederacy!“
In February 1865, two months before the end of the Civil War, the Confederate mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, surrendered. One person who accepted his surrender was William Dupree, Second Lieutenant of the Massachusetts 55th Infantry Regiment — a Black regiment. Imagine the power of an African American receiving the Confederate surrender. Nothing more clearly symbolized that, by the end of the war, the Union cause had become freedom. In the weeks and months after the fall of Charleston, Black people in South Carolina celebrated the Union victory and emancipation. They sang in the streets and laid flowers on the graves of Union soldiers. They cheered as Gen. Robert Anderson raised the American flag over Fort Sumter for the first time in four years. They paraded around Charleston carrying a coffin with a sign announcing the “death of slavery.”[1]
Four years earlier, Southern secessionists started the Civil War for one clear reason: to defend slavery and white supremacy. Confederate leaders stated this goal explicitly and repeatedly before and during the war. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared in 1861 that white supremacy was the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy. The declarations of secession adopted by Southern states revealed slavery as the reason for their breakup with the United States and as the foundation of their new government. Speeches and letters from pro-secession state commissioners — who traveled around the South in 1860 and 1861 to convince state legislatures to join the Confederacy — unequivocally named the preservation of slavery and white supremacy as the goal of secession and of the new Confederate government.[2] No one presented with this historical evidence could deny that slavery was the Confederate cause.
Former Confederates, vanquished on the battlefield, did not accept the new order and fought to ensure that the cause of freedom would die — both in practice and in the memory of the American people.
Initially, the United States fought to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery. But because of the tireless efforts of Black and white abolitionists to make liberation the Union cause, by 1863 the war had become a conflict between slavery and freedom. So Black people celebrated the death of slavery and a new birth of freedom in the streets of Charleston in 1865. But securing political freedom and civil rights would take more than victory on the battlefield. The period of Reconstruction following the Civil War represented the attempt of Black people and their white allies to finish what the Union army had started: to secure the freedom that Union victory promised. Former Confederates, vanquished on the battlefield, did not accept the new order and fought to ensure that the cause of freedom would die — both in practice and in the memory of the American people. Former Confederates used terror and violence to deny Black people freedom in the South, and they deployed ideology and myths to erase the cause of freedom from American memory.
In 1866, a year after the Civil War ended, Confederate journalist Edward Pollard published a book called The Lost Cause. In it, he wrote that what the South lost on the battlefield it would carry on in “a war of ideas.” “The war,” he asserted, “did not decide negro equality.” [3] Pollard proudly admitted that the goal of the Confederacy was to defend white supremacy. He argued that although the Confederates lost on the battlefield, if white supremacists won the war of ideas, they could still achieve their goal of a society based on racial hierarchy.
Former Confederates answered Pollard’s call to battle for the nation’s memory in the decades following the war. They began an organized propaganda campaign to remake the memory of the Civil War. Historian David Blight calls this “one of the most highly orchestrated grassroots partisan histories ever conceived.”[4] Novels, films, folk songs, textbooks, school curricula, social clubs, and — above all — public memorials were the artillery that former Confederates used in this battle for the American memory. Through an assault on history, education, and the American landscape, groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) created the myth of the Lost Cause. These groups edited textbooks to erase slavery as the cause of the war. If hundreds of thousands of Americans had not fought and died for an end to the barbarism of chattel slavery, then there was little momentum for white Northerners to struggle against Jim Crow and sacrifice for civil rights. Through books like Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings and Gone with the Wind, Lost Cause propagandists asserted the racist lie that enslaved people were happy and did not want or need freedom. In films like Birth of a Nation, they portray the North as aggressive and unjust toward the Southern slave states, before the war, during the war, and afterward in Reconstruction. The last thing Americans should do, argued Lost Cause proponents, would be to repeat the same injury and intervene against Jim Crow. Above all, the UDC and SCV sponsored more than 2,300 memorials to Confederate leaders and soldiers. They erected statues and monuments, and they dedicated parks and roadways. These memorials became part of the American landscape and fictionalized Confederate leaders as American heroes — great, tragic, honorable and triumphant even in defeat.
Amnesia and Terror
So successful was the Lost Cause propaganda campaign that many Americans forgot the true meaning of the Civil War. In the decades following the war, the cause of emancipation disappeared from speeches commemorating the dead, school curricula included the lie that the Confederacy had fought for “states’ rights” rather than slavery, and Northern politicians spoke more about reconciliation with former Confederates than about the unfinished business of civil rights. Thousands of Confederate memorials littering the American landscape from California to Maryland signified the extent of the Lost Cause distortion of Civil War history.[5]
But there was one group of Americans who could never forget the true meaning of the Civil War or the horror of slavery. African Americans understood the Lost Cause propaganda machine for what it was and, from the beginning, fought to preserve the memory of slavery and of the war for liberation. For Black Americans, therefore, Confederate memorials could not induce “amnesia,” but instead had a different effect: terror and intimidation. In 2021, a University of Virginia study found that counties with higher instances of lynchings in the past also had higher numbers of Confederate memorials. It is no coincidence that lynch mobs often chose Confederate monuments as a backdrop for murder during Jim Crow. Lynchings were a form of terror that sent the message that justice in America was “whites only.” Reinforcing that message were hundreds of Confederate memorials in front of courthouses across the United States. Nearly 20% of the country’s 2,300 original Confederate memorials were erected on courthouse lawns, the majority of these between the years 1900 and 1920 — the height of Jim Crow. “When I grew up, we knew at nighttime not to go [on the courthouse lawn],” MarTeze Hammonds said in the film Ghosts of a Lost Cause. “We would walk longways around instead of going through the courthouse square,” he described, recalling how groups would gather in the square chanting racist slurs and slogans. Hammonds grew up long after the era of Jim Crow, but the memory remained, and so does the Robert E. Lee monument in front of the Calloway County Courthouse in Murray.[6]
The third edition of this report, published in 2022, chronicles other ways segregationists deployed Confederate symbols to establish white supremacy, such as naming schools after Confederate officials following Brown v. Board in 1954 and naming sports teams “The Confederates” or “The Rebels” immediately following Jackie Robinson’s integration of baseball in 1947. Readers should also look to that report for more details on the long history of Black opposition to the Lost Cause propaganda campaign, from Frederick Douglass diagnosing the dangers of Civil War amnesia in 1871 to Mary Church Terrell defeating a congressional bill to erect a racist “Black Mammy” statue on the National Mall in 1923. The contemporary movement against Lost Cause propaganda builds on this inspiring and hard-fought work from the past, just as modern exponents of the Lost Cause hit the same notes established decades ago by desperate and defeated white supremacists after the Civil War.
Illustration by Simón Prades.
Part II: The Contemporary Landscape
Part III: New Forms of Public Memory
Explore: Whose Heritage? Map
Resources: Community Action Guide
[1] David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), 65.
[2] Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (University of Virginia Press).
[3] Edward Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (E.B. Treat & Co., 1866), 753. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:2001.05.0183.
[4] Blight, Race and Reunion, 259.
[5] Blight, Race and Reunion, chapter 4.
[6] MarTeze Hammons, “Ghosts of a Lost Cause,” Jerry Seavo James and Sherman Neal II, August 4, 2023, 6 min., 12 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpRwp2YtcCM.
For a complete list of citations used in this report, click here.