I’m too busy to enter the debate because I get swept away in these things, but just as a matter of historiography I’ll add that The Lost Cause (a term that was coined during the war believe it or not- though very soon before it ended) is a lot like religions or political parties in that it is not the least bit static. What it is now is not what it was during Jim Crow is not what it was during Reconstruction, etc.- the agenda changes with the times. I’m not saying this is a good thing- in fact I attribute it to a mutating virus- but it is interesting.
To the extent it had a father that would be Edward Pollard, a Virginia journalist who wrote yearbooks of the Confederacy during the war. Pollard’s agenda: he knew Jefferson Davis before the war during his D.C. career, he knew him by reputation, he’d been a guest in his house, and he HATED him with a burning passion. Many journalists in the Confederacy- which had a very free press- loathed Davis, but few if any more than Pollard. His annual volumes (which he understood to be writing the chronicles of the war for future historians) could have been called "“Things Davis fucked up in 1862”, “1863, or 365 more reasons to hate Jefferson Davis”, “1864, or Know who I fucking hate? Rhymes with Deff Jayvis” and “The state of the Confederacy 1865- now with 8 fewer months (thanks to Jeff Davis”).
I’m not a fan of Davis by any means for reasons I’ve gone into many times, but I will say that nobody could have been a good president of the Confederacy as it was the original herding cats assignment. The independency of the individual states were one of the many things that damned them- it was hard getting them to work together. (Examples: South Carolina let thousands of uniforms rot rather than give them to states that desperately needed them while the governors of Georgia tried their dead level damnedest to keep their troops in their own state and saw no need in them defending Virginia.) Davis tried ruling with an iron hand and got laughed at, tried being more appeasing and got sneered at, many of his generals had similar problems working together (one that I increasingly loathe as a person from what I read is Leonidas Polk, as arrogant and conceited a bastard as the war produced and with near nothing to back it up [other than a shitload of money when the war started]). By the end tyranny was near impossible, though it didn’t stop Pollard from calling him a tyrant.
Anyway, Davis went to prison in 1865 and could have done Dr. Eric Vornoff’s soliloquy for the next two years for he truly was hunted and despised in a world of which he’d once been master. Yet in 1867 he was beloved- and not just in the south, he had a large northern fan base due to a masterful and intentional PR campaign.* Soon Pollard was obsolete- he had blamed the Lost Cause’s failure- this Cotton Camelot to coin a term- on Davis (because you certainly couldn’t blame it on the soldiers could you? Or the generals- not all of them anyway, Bragg was pretty despised, and later Longstreet but that was more for being a scalawag than any real or perceived military failings).
Of course as Chicago states “it’s good isn’t it/grand isn’t it… but nothing stays” and in a few years Davis was a pathetic old has been, Norma Desmond minus the money, fallen from Olympus into the swamps where he hustled for a buck and instead of mansions lived in rooms rented on credit for a while. He had a small but faithful cult but most people forgot he existed (many of his former slaves actually did remember he existed- some sent him everything from money to food, and this when they were far out of his control- he also loaned money to a derelict former Union soldier who had previously been one of his guards- not relevant but interesting if only to me) but he died a monomanic old man writing 1,500 page testimonies to answer questions nobody asked. He had a huge funeral when he died in New Orleans but they were pretty much burying an era more than a dried up old man who had worked himself to death trying to resurrect his plantation.
Anyway, in Davis’s own lifetime the Lost Cause became about other things. Veneration of the Dead was a huge part of it. Later it became about race relations (always an issue of it but they became the driving issue). It’s no coincidence that by 1915, when Jim Crow was in full bloom (something many people don’t realize is the South didn’t go straight from the Civil War or even straight from the end of Reconstruction into Jim Crow- that was a gradual process) most people who were alive could not remember the war and while they certainly would have known the members of the family who died in it they didn’t feel it personally, just as few people today mourn the loss of family members who died in Vietnam or Korea (i.e. they know that Uncle Jimmy or even Dad/Grandpa died in it, but those who lost children in Vietnam are ancient and those who lost spouses aren’t much younger and those who lost others have gotten over it for the most part if they’re ever going to and most people were born after it altogether). Anyway, that’s when race became the primary focus of Lost Cause- there was a time when being white meant something and we were kings.
The Depression changes the Lost Cause again- these fields have turned to dust and people are being evicted everywhere you look, yet there was a time when there were more millionaires on the Mississippi River than in all of the rest of the country combined and the U.S. south was in and of itself one of the largest economies in the world. Is this desolation due to failure to diversify or to changing markets or to the destruction of the soil with overplanting cash crops or just historical crap shoots or the heat or the fact the world is moving in an opposite rotation? HELL NAW, it was that war (which while not recent enough to remember it was recent enough to be a golden era and the fact the new godmakers from Hollywood were romanticizing it to hell and back didn’t hurt).
1950s- Lost Cause is about race again. Speed up to today, it’s about “down with big gubmint/back with Baby Jesus in the schools” on the social level and on the racial level it’s less “blacks need to go back to the back of the bus” than “Goddam it we’re sick and tired of being blamed for everything bad that ever happened to anybody because we’re white”. Like most hateful ideologies, there is truth in the kernel form within: who among us of the whites hasn’t in all honesty sometimes felt tired of hearing how evil we are, and who doesn’t sometimes wish the government would go screw (I’m really feeling it after paying taxes of course), and while we don’t make it a fanaticism, some people do. Most minority ideologies are simplistic, simplicity in ideology needs a dualist system (again the curse of Queen Margaret- “Compare dead happiness to living woe”) and so Beulah Land and hoop skirts again become the swampy Eden from which we were driven in neo-Confederate mythology.
It’s really fascinating how malleable it is, but it explains the longevity.
*Facebook friends will know my own VERY LONG conspiracy theory about- involves everything from clairvoyant photography to international espionage to Judah Benjamin to one of the most mysterious men of the 19th century [a man whose name appears exactly once in near every famous 19th century American’s biography and an epic financial ruination scheme orchestrated against… well, another time as I doubt anyone’s interested, but trust me- it’s good and unlike most ct’s it makes sense.
