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One-hundred-fifty years ago Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Ulysses S. Grant and brought an end to the armed rebellion we call the Civil War. One-hundred fifty years and only now have we reached the moment when Southern mythology about the Civil War may at last be overwritten by the combination of current events and historical truths. The massacre in the Charleston church by an avowed racist and the resulting calls to end the public display of the Confederate battle flag have incited a public re-examination of the myths that have obscured the roots of the virulent racism that has persisted in American society from its inception.

As Jonathan Chait succinctly points out, having lost the war on the battlefield, white Southerners set about creating the narrative of the Lost Cause:

”The story of the Civil War is that the United States won the war but lost the occupation. Union soldiers occupied the South and attempted to rebuild a colorblind democracy, an effort called Reconstruction. The Confederate forces eventually reconstituted themselves as an non-uniformed guerilla army that could melt invisibly into the civilian population and launch strikes to defeat the occupying army and terrorize its allies — freed blacks and sympathetic white Republicans. Eventually, the white North gave up and allowed white Southerners to disenfranchise African-Americans and reimpose white supremacy while stopping short of full enslavement. The reconciliation between whites of the North and South formed the basis for the country’s self-conception. The veneration of treason did, in its strange way, support a patriotic idea — an idea of a country after a brief and tragic misunderstanding.

“The winners write the history books, and — having defeated the postwar occupation — the newly victorious South set about falsifying the history of the period. It defined Reconstruction as the “misrule” by “carpetbaggers.” The entire country emphasized reconciliation between whites of the North and South, presenting the conflict as regrettable and perhaps unnecessary. The leaders of the Confederacy have been memorialized as heroes, their names adorning roads and schools throughout the South. The thousands of victims of white domestic terrorism, by contrast, have gone almost completely unacknowledged.”

This revisionist retelling of events was not only false, but intellectually dishonest to the point of being blatantly cynical. Defenders of the Lost Cause have always maintained that the war was fought over “states’ rights”, a canard of the first-order. Plain and simple- the war was an attempt to preserve a barbaric economic system by which the cheap cost of slave labor enriched a relatively small group of land owners. In the post-Enlightenment period, Western philosophy provided no justification for the enslavement of humans for economic gain. Instead, the rationale for the bondage of other human beings was encapsulated in racist doctrine: Blacks were mentally inferior to whites but were well-suited to manual labor; slavery was actually a benefit to them. Denigration by race was the instrument by which the wealthy few defended the subjugation of the blacks and maintained the loyalty of poor whites. So interwoven was racism into the fabric of Southern life that it has survived long after the peculiar institution for which it served as raison-d’être. Slavery and racist attitudes were not limited to the South, but it was only Dixie, in its stubborn persistence to maintain a brutal economic model, that embraced a philosophy that ultimately led to armed insurrection.

In the Ante-Bellum South, the concept of states’ rights was promulgated by Southern politicians as a tidy way to nullify laws passed by the Federal Congress, especially those intended on halting the spread of slavery into the new states entering the Union. Maintaining the idea that the “state” was a sacrosanct political entity, those who favored a weak central government leaned heavily for justification on the so-called “reserve clause” of the Constitution which limited the central government to its enumerated powers ¹ (an argument that continues to exist in various forms today).  Opponents countered with their own Constitutional legalism, the “Elastic Clause” ².   

Fact is the original states were colonies, artificial creations of the English crown; their boundaries were arbitrary, their governments a patchwork dependent upon the various recipients of the royal charters. In the same way, the states that joined the Union after the ratification of the Constitution were creations of the national government. The transformation of the former colonies or territories into states represented a convenience of governance, a practical division of governing responsibility and accountability. The nation was divided into states in the same way states were broken into counties and cities. The national government does not decide, for example, which streets in Macon, GA should be paved this year. Arguing the United States exists as a federalized collection of individual states rather than a single union subdivided into component states is specious, given that the Constitution was written with the purpose of creating a stronger national government than had existed under the Articles of Confederation. At worst, it represents a cynical perversion of the political process for the financial benefit of a privileged minority.

From the outset, during the negotiations the led to the ratification of the Constitution, the South exerted outsized influence over the composition of the new Congress. For one, each state was given two Senators, regardless of population, putting the less-populous South on par with the North in the upper Chamber. More egregious was the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of allocating seats in the House of Representatives. Since slaves could not vote, the effect was that the South elected pro-slavery whites and held a majority in the House until the Civil War. As the nation expanded westward in the 1800’s, anti-slavery sentiment grew stronger. The South used its political advantage to prevent territories from entering the Union as “free states”, which would have led to eventual abolition of slavery.  The widening of the schism between the slave states and the free states was only prevented by a series of legislative compromises. 

The Myth of Confederate Military Superiority

It is clear that, at the onset of war that followed the election of Abraham Lincoln, the declarations of secession by the Southern states and the attack on Fort Sumter, neither side grasped the nature of warfare in the industrial age. Revisionist Confederate history makes much of the military prowess of the South, particularly its generals, but the ineffectiveness of Union commanders in the war's first years certainly contributed to the legends of Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Again the myth is far different from the reality. 

Given that traditional tactics called for assaulting formations to cross open ground to engage dug-in defenders, the numbers of casualties in large-scale battles were horrendous. Being victorious in a battle often entailed suffering as many killed and wounded as the losing side. Lee’s reputation was built on audacious movements against attacking Union armies. His two attempts to go on the offensive failed, at Antietam in 1862 and Gettysburg the following summer. The latter battle is instructive about Lee’s shortcomings: The frontal assault on the Union center which held the higher ground, was made across a mile-and-a-half of open field against massed artillery and small arms fire. What is remarkable about Pickett’s Charge, arguably the last great assault of Napoleonic-style warfare, was that only seven months earlier, Lee’s army had inflicted an enormous number of casualties on Union troops at Fredericksburg as they launched multiple assaults up Mayre’s Heights. Given the near-identical circumstances, it is difficult to comprehend Lee's failure to adjust tactics.

[If the South came to venerate Lee, Jackson and even the murderous slaver Nathan Bedford Forrest, how should the North regard Grant and Sherman, and naval commanders such as Porter and Farragut?]

On the strategic level, the Confederacy never embraced the total nature of the conflict. Dependent on the ability to trade their principal crop, cotton, the South had no Navy to protect shipping or challenge the Union blockade. As the war progressed, the Union augmented its blue-water fleet with vessels capable of conducting operations on the rivers of the South. The more heavily-populated North fielded larger armies; Northern industry produced a greater quantity of war material. Northern ingenuity produced repeating rifles and flotillas of iron-clad gunboats. The Confederacy was committed to a defensive war, feeling that preventing the capture of territory would eventually lead a war-weary North to negotiations or that a resounding defeat of a Union army might lead to diplomatic recognition from Britain and France.

Hope is never much of a strategy. Such was the cultural blindness of Southern leadership to the empirical realities of the war, that even Jefferson Davis, a West Point graduate and former U.S. Secretary of War, never fully accepted the long odds the South faced. The glorification of Southern arms may be a romantic notion, but it is intellectually vacuous.*

It was nearly a century ago that H.L. Mencken published a scathing column – The Sahara of the Bozart- lambasting the South for its lack of culture and intellect.  “There are single acres in Europe,” he wrote, “that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles in America.”  Before listing his specific complaints in detail, Mencken noted that “If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave tomorrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood on the Yang-tse-kiang [River].”

By present-day standards, Mencken’s acerbic tone would be termed over-the-top but the theme running through the piece touches on an anti-intellectual strain in Southern culture that has resurfaced in the current discussions of the rebel flag. The myths fostered by the Lost Cause notwithstanding, none of this puffery obviates the fact that the excuses the land-owning class employed to tear the Union apart to protect their wealth lacked any substantive intellectual foundation. By the mid-19^th Century, the nation’s agrarian economy which had long been dominated by the South was being overtaken by the industrialization of the North. Instead of making accommodation with the changing society of which they were a part, the rich whites of the South were determined to cling to the plantation way of life. To protect their slave-based economy, they hoisted the banner of state’s rights.

All societies have stains on their records, events which at later times are seen to be wrong. When the core values of a society are strong enough, this history is acknowledged and a corrective course plotted. We should look back in shame at our genocide of Native Americans, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and denying the vote to women. Yet none of these are as malignant as the evil of slavery and the racism it allowed to metastasize.  

The first step in our twelve-step program must be to admit reality and eradicate the romantic mythology of the Lost Cause.

¹ Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”. 

²  Article 1, Section 8, Clause 18:  "The Congress shall have Power - To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."

*A parallel can be drawn here between the Confederacy and the Japan of World War II. Infected with “victory disease” from their military successes in China,  Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific, the Japanese could never accept that the industrial might of the United States would mean it would methodically win a war of attrition in the Pacific. Admiral Yamamoto, who had lived in the US in the 1930’s, understood that reality. He felt that, if the US could not be made to negotiate within six months of the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan would never win. Six months later, the Japanese fleet suffered a crushing defeat at Midway. Only a stubborn cultural perseverance allowed the war to continue another three years at the costs of millions of lives.