The Lost Cause's Greatest Achievement
Among the claims made by Lost Cause writers after the Civil War, the belief in a unified Confederacy was essential. Confederate soldiers and civilians, according to this narrative, remained loyal to the cause right through to the end of the war. Internal disputes between governors and the federal government in Richmond, along with “Bread Riots,” and desertions from the army were minimized if not entirely ignored.
Most importantly, the Lost Cause recalled the enslaved population as having been loyal to their masters and the Confederacy. Freedom, they argued, was forced on them by “Yankee” invaders.
Reading Elizabeth Varon’s new biography of James Longstreet, I am reminded that Lost Cause writers also demanded obedience among former Confederates. As Longstreet and others learned, former Confederates who challenged the Lost Cause narrative and who aligned themselves with the Republican Party were dealt with harshly.
It’s not a stretch to suggest that the Lost Cause narrative’s most significant impact on Civil War memory has been on minimizing dissent among former Confederates. People who accuse others of “hating the South” or being “anti-Confederate” are doing so based on a Lost Cause assumption that former Confederates themselves rallied around a standard narrative.
We should view these people as the descendants of Jubal Early and other Lost Cause boosters, struggling to maintain obedience, as opposed to the heirs of a memory of the Confederacy that is only now being challenged.
Longstreet was vilified by many former Confederates for his embrace of the Republican Party’s Reconstruction agenda, his acceptance of federal patronage under the Grant and Hayes administrations, and especially for his criticisms of Robert E. Lee’s command decisions at Gettysburg. In New Orleans, he fought against former Confederates in The White League, who violentley pushed out the legally elected bi-racial state governemnt.
It’s important to remember that Longstreet was far from alone in his Lost Cause apostasy. I’ve written extensively over the years about William Mahone—former Confederate general, who eventually led the most successful bi-racial party in Virginia between 1879 and 1883. Mahone also aligned himself with the Republican Party and came to blows with Jubal Early over the war.
Mahone was often compared to John Brown and Benedict Arnold.
Here are two examples of the political opposition that Mahone faced owing to his leadership of Readjuster Party.
In 1858 [sic] occurred the raid of John Brown and the raid of Mahone and the Readjusters in 1879, though less bloody was more dangerous than that of John Brown. Both raids occurred in Va, and the negro was in both cases the instrument relied on to destroy the old order of things. [George Bagby’s pamphlet, John Brown and William Mahone: An Historical Parallel, Foreshadowing Civil Trouble]
The Revolution gave us but one Arnold, during the whole seven years of its course, while the Confederate war failed to yield a single one on either side until after it had been fought out.” Though many of Virginia’s native sons “held out long and well. . . at last some of them succumbed, and are now found, Arnold-like, leading their old enemy against their old friends and associates. [The Richmond State, 1881]
Even as late as the 1940’s in Virginia, “the worst charge that could be brought against an [anti-Democratic] candidate was that he had been associated in any way with Mahone and the Readjusters.”
Longstreet and Mahone are two high-profile examples of postwar dissent, but these fault lines among former Confederates ran deep.
John Christopher Winsmith, a captain in the First South Carolina regiment, was what historian Jason Phillips refers to as a “diehard rebel.” Throughout the war, Winsmith never wavered in his enthusiasm for the Confederacy. He believed that it was incumbent on everyone in the Confederacy to make the necessary sacrifices in the army and on the home front.
In letters that routinely characterized the Lincoln and the United States army as “invaders” and “abolitionists” it is clear that Winsmith viewed the struggle as a war to protect slavery. Winsmith’s father, who served in the state legislature in 1860, introduced the following resolution immediately after Lincoln’s election to the presidency:
That this General Assembly is satisfied that Abram Lincoln has already been elected President of the United States, and that said election has been based upon principles of open and avowed hostility to the social organization and peculiar interests of the slave holding states of this Confederacy.
The father fully supported the war effort by purchasing Confederate bonds as well as his sons efforts to advance his carrer in the army.
Following the war both father and son supported the Republican Party. The former testified in 1872 in front of a state committee about an incident on his plantation involving the Ku Klux Klan that left him severely wounded.
John Christopher Winsmith served for one year as a brigadier general in the South Carolina militia after the war. On October 17, 1876, shortly before his death, Winsmith addressed a Republican rally in Spartanburg, SC. Much of the speech constitutes an explicit rejection of principles and beliefs once held by both father and son:
For four long and bloody years, on more than a score of battle fields, did I strive to strike down the flag of my country, but there it floats still, the star spangled banner, over the land of the free and the home of the brave, and I thank God that I am here today to declare to you, my countrymen, that never again will I essay to strike with uplifted hand that noble ensign of freedom. I thank God that I am here today to re-echo the words of that noble soldier General Robert E. Lee. Here are his words: ‘Secession is anarchy. If I owned the four million of slaves in the south, I would cheerfully emancipate them all to save the union.’
On slavery:
The congress of the confederate states declared that because of the election by the people of the United States ‘of a president and vice-president hostile to the south and her institutions the southern states withdrew from the union.’ ‘Her institutions,’ in the plural, means of course the one institution of slavery, for the south was characterized by no other institution. Vice-President Stevens declared that slavery was a social, moral and political benefit, and that the southern confederacy was founded upon the corner stone of slavery. The Saviour of the world, in his sermon on the mount, speaks of the foolish man who built his house upon the sand: ‘And the rain descended and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.’ The slaves in the southern states were held by a tenure of force…. When the southern confederacy was being founded upon that corner stone of slavery what was the opinion of the civilized world; what was the opinion of the fathers of our glorious republic in reference to it?
On states rights:
The next cause of our late war was states rights doctrine, that disjunctive doctrine according to which each portion of our country, called a state, is sovereign in the highest sense, allowing us no nationality, no country, and consequently no national government. The leading secessionists urged the strange idea that the state was superior to the general government, that a part was greater than the whole, overlooking the fact that the United States had rights too, and greater rights than any single state. A double allegiance would be a fearful problem for a conscientious citizen and worse than the allegiance of the feudal times, which was a graduated allegiance but not a double or multiplied one. We cannot faithfully serve two masters. The leading secessionists overlooked the fact that the constitution of the United States is a national work from beginning to end, conceived by the living national spirit of ‘one people’ in spite of destructive provincialism.
Jealousy of the North:
The third cause of the war, says Dr. Lieber, was southern jealousy at northern progress — a fevering jealousy when it was perceived that civilization, number of population, the arts, education, the ships and trade, schools and churches, literature and law, manufactures, agriculture, inventions, wealth, comfort and power were rapidly finding their home at the north to the great disparagement of the south, weighted down by slavery, which nevertheless the south would not recognize as an evil. All periods of such developments or changes of power and influence from one portion of a country to another, or from one class to another, have been periods of heartburning, but in this case the vaunting pride of the receding or lagging portion forbade them to acknowledge the cause.
None of these individuals were celebrated or memorialized after the war. Quite the opposite. Former Confederates, who refused to tow the Lost Cause party line were intimidated and insulted at every turn and, as a result, were largely lost to history.
It’s unfortunate that these original Lost Cause detractors are not more visible in the popular understanding of Civil War memory. We might better appreciate the myriad ways in which former Confederates struggled to come to terms with four years of war, the end of slavery, and everything else that transpired in a fast moving and expanding nation throughout the postwar period. Their lives followed many different paths.
Finally, we might better appreciate the extent to which the terms of the current debate over whether the Confederacy should continue to be commemorated and celebrated in public spaces was largely set by the generation that fought under its flag.
You can add Beauregard to the list - he supported schools for freedmen and was roundly condemned for that.
In addition to disappearing internal conflict during the war (well described by Stephanie McCurry's Confederate Reckoning) and USCTs (and their numerous formerly enslaved members), Lost Causers, as you point out, disappeared former Confederates whom they regarded as disloyal. These posts whet my eagerness to read the Longstreet biography.