Written by a Canadian of Six Nations and Jewish ancestry, to boot! 
White Supremacy?
I am not much of a student of the civil war. I know that some slaveowners lost their “property”, but the fact that those same slaves won their freedom seems like it more than offsets that property loss.
Who else lost what property? Fight my ignorance.
Moderating
It’s not “mutual masturbation” to ask someone to support their arguments, or to disagree with them. It’s NOT acceptable to refer to posters as engaging in that.
Moderating
This is out of line. Dial it back.
This is true, and should be stated frequently and prominently. Though it doesn’t matter that their cause deserved to lose. We (the global we) are fortunate that might equated right.
When you, with cold and deliberate calculation, commit full scale, prolonged armed insurrection and lose then for the consequences you need to look up the Articles of War in the subparagraphs about mutiny.
The guys who won played really nice in historical terms.
(The recent iteration are those wannabees who stormed the Capitol on Jan 6th then complained about being maced.)
Being ruled by duly elected Black people was punishment enough for many of them. I suspect most Dopers are too young to remember Southern governors in the early '60s pretty much saying this.
No one has mentioned that confederate currency became worthless, because the Union was mean enough not to support it. That’s property loss, but tough.
And in general, saying that the average conscripted southern soldier might not have been evil (since lots of them no doubt got forced to join at gunpoint) is different from saying that the cause they fought for was a good one.
(Cajuns were smart - a lot of them fled into the swamp.)
Of course it’s just racism.
No kidding, and it still is. Just look at @carnivorousplant in this thread. It was the white southerners who were unfairly “punished” for being traitors and killing their own countrymen. It doesn’t matter that millions of people were freed from slavery, because some white folk lost their right to vote for awhile. ( I don’t for a second think that any white that wanted to vote didn’t just go ahead and vote. Who was going to stop them? The people they served with?)
p.s. Happy Birthday!
How is this an excuse? They could have refused conscription.
The right thing to do would have been to take the bullet.
History allows us to study the errors and injustices of the past so that we can avoid them in the future.
This invaluable opportunity is lost on so many (as the article cited in the OP illustrates vividly). For them, history is about glorifying and justifying the acts of their Own Tribe. They think anyone who disagrees with them is just doing the same thing for the Other Side. The idea of history as a corrective lens that could help all of us completely eludes them.
Why would the Lost Cause myth be allowed to flourish? Since Money explains a lot, let’s ask it:
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It became useful as the US’s industrial output matched Great Britain’s and the German Empire’s in the 1990, and had to find customers beyond the domestic market. Solving this by actually paying American workers enough to buy the products they made was thought to be dangerously crazy. And this was still the time of old-style Mercantilism economic philosophy, aka captive markets, aka Gunboat Diplomacy. Of course one of those gunboats, the USS Maine, was blown up by a coal bunker fire and not a Spanish bomb, but a Confederate bomb would have made sense. The “Kiss and Make UP” approach started by Rutherford B. Hayes that dumped Reconstruction to smooth his election was cemented in order that a truly (re)United States would emerge on the international marketplace.
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J.P. Morgan started his fortune by selling defective guns to the Union Army. If they were rejected, he shipped them to a different, more easily greased purchasing agent. The big, dirty fortunes of the late 19th C. thus got their start in the boondoggle of the War, as well as the westward expansion that followed it. The cookie jar got bigger, and the grubby hands in it more numerous, until a reform candidate came in to clen it all up. Not William Jennings Bryan, who championed the working class and the small farmers. That was too leftist. The reformer was Woodrow Wilson, a Lost Cause Historian turned reformist university professor. His amateurish, bumbling pieties were acceptable, as was his racism. What does that say?
I do not know why the poor Southerners fought to protect the rich planter class, but it’s obvious that the poor Northerners fought to protect their meager wages from competition with slave labor, and to keep themselves in one big rich nation instead of two of lesser wealth. Once that was in hand, let the Southerners enjoy their empty Lost Cause myth, and the rest of us could enjoy our empty Emancipation myth.
Really? It’s “obvious”, is it?
This is, no kidding, the reason I wrote this:
We have honest to god examples of southerners who resisted the unlawful control of rebel authorities, and were brutally suppressed. If it’s just “southern pride” that Lost Causers are concerned with, then where are the monuments to such men as these? The one I mention in that post—to the extent it could even be called a monument, being more of a sign post—was recently taken down in Kinston, NC because it “upset” people to see it there. One can hope it’s because they didn’t like the crude depiction of men hanging being so prominently displayed with only a few meager lines of text to explain it, but one might also fear it’s because it upset their narrative of “Confederate pride” = “southern pride” rather than just “poor white southerners being duped by wealthy white men to fight a war to keep black people enslaved.”
Kentucky was unusual in those days because the governor was a Southern sympathizer but was blocked by a pro-Union legislature from doing anything concrete to aid the Confederacy, and the state remained solidly in the Union camp thanks to federal victories.
It’s sort of understandable given the state’s history that some dregs of “Lost Cause” sentiment might remain. What dumbfounded me when I lived there, was seeing a bit of the same taint in West Virginia, which famously seceded from Virginia to stay with the Union.
There is an argument that with western expansionism, the North wanted to keep the South from taking the slave economy show on the road. To the northerner mindset, the west was to be won primarily by white gumption, not black slave labor. So it wasn’t the love of equal human rights that primarily motivated the northern states to oppose the south; it was to prevent the spread of southern style colonialism. Putting an end to slavery in the south was just the icing on the cake.
Now, is that “obvious”? I leave that decision to the the readers.
Northern soldiers did not primarily fight to end slavery; they fought to preserve the Union.
Was that a selfish economic motivation? History tells us otherwise.
I notice how you jumped from specifically “poor Northerners” to “the northern states” pretty slickly there. So you’re saying these meager wage slaves had all this economic calculus in their heads?
Southern industrial plantation slavery was the result of the way the South was originally settled – by English aristocrats and aristowannabes who wanted to recreate feudalism in the New World, with them at the top. The large majority of whites were not plantation owners, of course. They were small farmers, share-croppers, small-town workers, and overseers and other employees of the big cheeses, who held all the power. These whites didn’t have any power or much hope of any, but they did have this one thing, that they were as far above black people as the aristos were above them. Blacks had to grovel before them.
Besides the propaganda of “Northern Aggression”, the threat of not having a completely powerless class under them, I believe, was a huge motivator. The demonstrations of hatred during the Civil Rights Movement and of course, beyond, by southern whites, is my evidence. Nothing went away. The Lost Cause story is the fantasy clothing racists give to their fear and hate, and also, their secret shame at how horribly their ancestors behaved. They aren’t the only ones, though. Think of how the whole US mythologizes the indigenous peoples it destroyed. Just for an adjacent example. But there are endless others.
I have never really understood why people squirm so vigorously away from the darkness in the past, in the present, in themselves. I’m all about the darkness and always have been. But it seems to be a giant part of most people’s psyches. If the past reflects badly on us, we will jolly well believe in pleasant lies, and you can’t stop us.
I didn’t start with “poor Northerners” so it did not require a mental leap for me to make my argument. Nor did I make any claims about the decision process of “meager wage slaves”.
(Aside: I don’t know why I continue to engage you in any discussion.)