The Myth of the Lost Cause Myth: What Motivates Spanberger's Heritage Purge?

Historiography, Hermeneutics, and the Lost Cause as a Historical Method

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast, I'm your host John Harris, I hope you enjoy what we have today. It is a special treat, I think we're going to talk about some historiography, which is something I really like because history is the study of the past.

As you know, historiography is kind of like the study of the study of the past. It's understanding the paradigms that we use as human beings to make sense of what came before us, the narratives we adopt, why those narratives were adopted, that kind of thing.

It's kind of like hermeneutics is to Bible study, right? The Bible says something not just about the past, but about a way that we should currently.

Live.

There's wisdom literature and apocalyptic literature and all kinds of things there. And hermeneutics are the rules that govern our approach to that particular document that help us understand what's relevant, what is application, what's just something we should interpret, how do we interpret it?

Should we correlate it with another passage? What does it mean in the context? What's the historical context, right? Historiography is kind of like that. And so I'm going to do a historiography on the lost cause today, showing you through time, so it's also a history, how people in the academic profession, especially historians, have approached this particular narrative about the Civil War, what alternatives they have made to this narrative, what they think actually happened.

And there's a really good reason we're doing it. And that's because Abigail Spanberger, the governor of Virginia, has decided to push forward two laws, one of them barring the tax exempt status in the state of Virginia from organizations that are concerned with Confederate heritage in some form, some connection there.

The other is a stripping of the commemorative license plates of Robert E. Lee that I used to see in Virginia when I was down there, that people would drive around with, they pay a little extra, the state got some revenue.

That's gone now because we shouldn't have Robert E. Lee on the back of a license plate driving around. So she stripped Virginia of that kind of funding because she doesn't want to see Robert E. Lee, presumably, and neither does the legislature because they passed the law.

So we're going to talk about it in this context. There's been hundreds of these Confederate monuments taken down. They were really the low-hanging fruit. They were the first to go. Confederate symbols have been under attack for years, Southern symbols in general.

And of course, I think all of us who said this was going to extend to broader American symbols because Robert E. Lee has been a broader American hero and people like him. We feel pretty vindicated right now.

We were right. And it's continuing to happen, and it's not making a lot of headlines. It should because this is an attack on not just the Southern identity, but it's an attack really on American identity more broadly.

If they can do it here, they can do it other places. Also, this is not something that can just be excised. We came back together as a country, North and South, fought world wars together, enjoyed each other's company and ribbed each other and thought of each other in the ways that brothers think of each other.

And now it's like that truce is all gone. And if that truce is gone, then what other things can unravel the American identity and the American as we know it, actually? There's fracture lines all over the place, and I think this contributes to them.

So I think it's going to be fun to pursue this as an academic pursuit, but also knowing that there are actual political and cultural implications to this. Let's get started. Before we do, I want to let you know about ETP Coffee, how you can help your brothers and sisters in Nigeria who are suffering persecution at the hands of Fulani terrorists and Boko Haram.

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All right, there you heard it. ETP Coffee, go check it out. Now, I have an article that I wrote, and we're going to just go over the article, and pretty simple, but it's kind of long, where it gets into the details, and I'm going to show you some pictures and stuff, but we start at the beginning here.

The war after the war is the title, reexamining a lost cause and its critics, and I wanted to do this while it was fresh in my mind, so you're watching this after I recorded.

It.

I recorded it and then immediately did this podcast on it. After the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the new regime under Gustav Husak dismissed 145 historians from Czech universities. One of the historians, Milan Hubbell, is said to have observed the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory.

Hubbell went on to predict that after a new history takes the shape of the old, the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. A similar sentiment was expressed by Southerners in the wake of the American Civil War.

Confederate General Patrick Claiborne declared, surrender means the history of our heroic struggle will be written by the enemy, that our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers, will learn from Northern school books their version of the war, will be impressed by all the influences of history and education to regard our gallant debtors traders and our main veterans as fit subjects of derision.

One last decade, over the last decade, Claiborne's prophecy has come to pass with hundreds of monuments removed, and I talked about some of that, and then the bills, HB 167 and 1344, which affected the license plates and the tax exempt status of heritage groups.

The current purge is not surprising though, as most conquered peoples meet similar fates, but it has been somewhat delayed. Part of the reason for this and for continued efforts to eradicate unreconstructed sentiment lies in the way many Southerners stubbornly held onto their past.

When the cannons fell silent in 1865, the pens became the only weapon the South had left, and many wielded it with remarkable skill. So this is how I start the introduction to the Lost Cause canon of literature, because there were a number of people during and after the war who were trying to write about what happened in a justifying way and saying like, well, I want the record straight.

This is what we did. We lost, but this is what we were intending. And this has been today, not just ignored, but when it is brought up, it's brought up as a subject of derision, that that's just the Lost Cause myth.

That's just spurious history. That's all wrong. That narrative is not just incomplete, but evil. And I think that's what Spanberger and others are really adopting. She's from, what, New Jersey, I think, originally.

I think the guy who introduced the bill is from the North somewhere. A lot of the people in Virginia aren't Virginians, which is part of the reason. And also, even those who are raised in these Southern areas now are getting an education from people who have been trained to reject anything related to what I'll explain in a minute, but the truce and the quote-unquote Lost Cause.

So the pro-Southern side of things, if you will. So let's talk about that a little bit. Let's talk about this canon of literature. What are we talking about when we talk about the Lost Cause? We're talking about vindications of the Southern Cause.

Basil L. Gildersleeve wrote a book, The Creed of the Old South, in 1865. You had Albert Taylor Bledsoe writing as Davis a Traitor. Edward Pollard wrote the book, The Lost Cause, which is where the name comes from.

Robert Louis Dabney wrote A Defense of Virginia and Threw Her to the South in 1867. Alexander Stevens released the two volumes, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between.

The States.

He was the vice president of the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis, the rise and fall of the Confederate government. He was the Confederate president. And then Lieutenant Colonel J. Baz L .M. Curry wrote The Southern States of the American Union in 1894.

So you have this after the war period where people are writing their memoirs. They're telling the story of what happened, and they're writing down for posterity what happened so that they can also prevent lies from being adopted by their grandchildren.

Now, it hasn't worked out that way, but it really has. Those were contributions that allowed the South to hang on to kind of a pride and not necessarily in a bad way, but an identity and understanding that their heroes were actually heroic, that they weren't the evil villains or at least as evil as they were being cast.

And so this continued for quite some time. It still continues, but it continued in a strong form, in a cultural form for quite some time. You had the Southern Historical Society. You had the Southern Review out of Baltimore.

Recently, the canon of lost cause literature has greatly expanded, making it difficult to define. Before the war ended, two basic opposing historical graphical paradigms had already emerged. So you have the lost cause narrative where the majority of critical attention has been devoted.

And you also had this northern slave power or righteous cause narrative. And these were the two primary ways people used to describe, explain, understand the.

War.

And we're not going through an examination necessarily of the righteous cause, but this is kind of what we're all taught. If we go to school in pop culture, really everywhere you go, it's the idea that the North was there to preserve the Union, to free the slaves.

They accomplished that mission, and then both sides came together. And at this point, I don't know that it used to be more like that was a good thing, and the South thought valiantly. It was part of it.

But this has, I think, become more a very anti-Southern viewpoint that anything about the South is negative. And so the North is viewed in glowing terms. Now, some of the woke stuff actually was critical of this, that like the South is bad, but hey, the North isn't that much better.

And we might get to some of that, but most of us grew up with this sort of righteous cause understanding of the war. University of South Carolina historian Clyde Wilson in Defending Dixie, a 2006 book, outlines a basic history on how these divergent positions have interacted.

Throughout Reconstruction, Southerners were officially the demons of American history and the minds of Yankees for their crimes of trying to destroy the greatest nation on earth because of their lust for slavery.

Wilson makes a separation between Yankees and those he regards as decent Northerners like Joshua Chamberlain, who he saluted the defeated. So he fought them, but he actually respected them. A critical period to understanding the modern historiographical situation came in the 1890s when a truce was called to which most Northerners and Southerners subscribed in good faith.

Wilson goes on to recount in a 1907 speech given by Charles Francis Adams, Jr. on the centennial of Robert E. Lee's birth called Lee the American. Southern participation in the Spanish-American war, joint union and confederate reunions, and the charitable portrayals of both the South and Lincoln together all symbolized the truce.

And so really what you have here is people are getting older, the veterans are aging, and they want to get together and remember what happened. They want to join even with their compatriots now who were on the other side of the conflict and they laugh, they play games.

There's all sorts of footage of this. People who were shooting at each other actually came to respect one another quite a bit. Monuments start getting erected because we know that this generation is about to die and we want to remember them.

That's why there's monuments in the first place. How many of them say to slavery, to white supremacy? None of them say that. They're all about to the bravery of the men who fought, those kinds of things.

So this is what's going on starting really in the 1890s. And this becomes a truce, Clyde Wilson calls it. It went something like this. Northerners agreed to stop demonizing Southerners and to recognize that we have been brave and sincere and honorable in the war, although misguided in trying to break up the union.

Northerners agreed also that the Reconstruction was a great wrong that would not have happened if Lincoln had lived. And they willingly accepted Confederate heroes like Lee and Jackson as American heroes.

So some of you, especially in the South, grew up with this, where there was a respect for Lincoln. Now, depending on where you were, if you're in my dad's generation, you may have gotten Jefferson Davis's birthday off instead of Lincoln's birthday, but you probably had somewhat of a respect at least.

Some places, you just didn't still like him. He was bad. He was a villain. But there was a growing sentiment of, well, we should probably like him. But also, we definitely respect Robert E. Lee. We respect Jefferson Davis.

And thank God the nation's together. I mean, that was kind of the sentiment, I think, for years. And I would have caught the last gasping breath of that when I was growing up. That's all changed, of course.

This truce held strong in general popular and civic culture up into the middle of the 20th century, at which time it started to fade. It was completely broken by the time Wilson gave his observations in 2003.

The relative new myth of the lost cause is cited by Wilson as one of the evidences of the broken agreement. So now that it's not just the lost cause, it's the myth of the lost cause. That's how it's referred to as if there's some extra layer of untruth there, right?

And here you have some pictures. This is General Robert E. Lee on a recruitment for probably World War II. I fought for Virginia. Now it's your turn. Join the Lee Navy volunteers. And then here's one from World War II as well.

This is the advertisement for Coca-Cola, and it portrays Stonewall Jackson. He taught us to pause, and that is what refresh really means. So it's Coca-Cola marketing based off of Stonewall Jackson and military service.

In 1867, ghosts of the Confederacy defeat the lost cause and the emergence of the New South. Gaines M. Foster, a historian at Louisiana State University, makes a similar observation to Clyde Wilson. He says the election of Grover Cleveland helped convince Southerners that they had a political future with the Union, but Northern respect was needed to heal the wounds of the defeat.

In the late 70s and early 80s, a tentative rapprochement with Northern soldiers and acknowledgment in the National Publication of Southern Heroism indicated that a few Northerners were willing to proffer such respect.

Soldiers served as key agents in reconciliation because they had developed respect for one another in the war. So he's affirming what Clyde Wilson is saying there. By the 20th century, the lost cause position was fading as the conciliatory motif gained.

Steam.

To put it another way, the lost cause had been absorbed into a greater American narrative. As the South rebuilt its academic infrastructure, professional historians augmented the way history was rebranded.

By the 1930s, the term Civil War had been the major term before that. Southerners liked more neutral terms like war between the states, but it was sort of going in a pro-North direction, right? Foster writes, after 1913, little institutional structure survived to sustain the memory of.

The war.

Fewer and fewer towns put up monuments, and in the late 1920s, schoolboys in three Alabama cities cited Lincoln more often than Lee as a historical or public character after whom they wished to model themselves.

So it doesn't mean the Southern interpretation just went away. It means it was respected. It was sort of alongside this broader American interpretation of the war, which is, I think, more so what I inherited and what I probably was defensive of, especially in my teenage years when I started seeing some of these monuments come down.

I thought this was a terrible thing. I have a lot of family in Mississippi, and I thought these are my ancestors. They're not taking down the Northern ones. Why are they taking down the Southern ones?

Both sides fought honorably. Both have contributions to make. And this, of course, gets you the charge of, you must be a slavery apologist, or you must be a neo-Confederate, or you must be any one of these things.

And I think, for me personally, I guess I'm speaking personally for a minute here. I think, for me, this wound up with me taking a more Southern side, especially of the constitutional issues related to secession and the importance of defending oneself against an invasion.

I mean, that wasn't something the South necessarily chose. I mean, they seceded, but that doesn't merit an invasion, right? So the slavery issue was always more sticky, and this video is really not for that.

I've already done videos on this. But the slavery issue is, if I can really boil it down for a moment, it was something that had been boiling for decades along a few different fault lines. The main one was an economic fault line, whether or not there would be slavery allowed in the Western territories.

Because if slavery was allowed, that was the Southern elite who could go there, and they would be in control of the state. It really was overpower. Who's going to control the destiny of the state economically?

Southerners had a very different view of economics. One of the things that gets a lot of press is the tariff issue, but it was bigger than.

That.

I mean, the Southern philosophy was things like, they don't want standing armies, right? They're very much more for smaller government, agrarian principles, more Orthodox in their Christianity. There was just a civilizational clash.

But slavery becomes a fault line for that. And in the Postal Crisis, in the 18th, the second one in the 1850s, this just sort of reaches a fever pitch, and there's a number of compromises and a number of things that try to alleviate this.

Eventually, it winds up in the election of Abraham Lincoln, and then the Lower South says, we can't be part of this anymore. Part of the reason they cited, and they cited more than one reason, but part of it is that he's not going to respect popular sovereignty in the Western territories.

He is going to make them free states. And if they're free states, if this is not going to allow slavery, this prohibits the South and the Southern elites from being in these areas. That wasn't a question of whether slavery ought to end.

Slavery, the Confederate Constitution ends up outlawing slavery, as I should say, the slave trade. Slavery itself is, by the end of the Confederacy, they are offering emancipation in exchange for military service.

There were people who wanted to see it progressively end, but they needed an integration and compensation strategy. It couldn't just end without those things. And so there was never a plan for that in the American Union, and there wasn't a way during a war to come up with a plan for that.

So this is sort of in brief what happens. The Lower South does cite this. The Upper South doesn't cite slavery at all. They secede because there's an invasion. They don't want to live in that. And so the South binds together.

Low country and upcountry in places like South Carolina bind together. They all go through this together. And there's a Southern identity that really gets, it was there before, but it gets strengthened in this particular process.

And there's still a Southern identity. There's still like a particular way of life, a slower way of life, food, religion, hospitality, it's music, it's art. It's all kinds of things that people think of when they think of the South.

And black and white, by the way. So, you know, this is sort of this, these immigration patterns that contribute to that region, Scotch-Irish in the mountains, Lowlands, Cavaliers, they contribute to one broad culture in this whole process.

Slavery does shape it. Obviously, there's Africans who also immigrated and they brought their contributions. And Eugene Genovese does a wonderful job showing all this. But, but the issue isn't so much a moral issue.

Although from the abolitionist perspective, the South is evil because there's slavery there and they want to vilify the South. That's what the postal crisis is about. That's John Brown. These things, the vilification of the South, they react to, they become defensive.

They don't think they're doing anything innately wrong or sinful. Many of them are still gradual emancipationists like Robert E. Lee, but this does impact the fault lines between North and South. So there's my little spiel on how slavery pertains to this.

If we had more time, we get into slave conditions and other things. But I think that really the takeaway from everything I just said is that this truce that formed doesn't include those abolitionists smears on the South.

It's really just saying slavery is done now. It's over. It ended. You fought valiantly. We're both glad now that it's over with. Let's come back together as a country. We can honor Robert E.

Lee.

We can honor Abraham Lincoln. You had a point. We had a point and we won. And then let's move forward and meet new challenges because those challenges are in the past. We've got new ones coming up like Spanish American War, World War One, World War Two and the South and the North fight alongside each other and they gain trust of each other.

Again.

So that's the truce. That's what happens after reconstruction. The Lost Cause narrative was seen in both popular culture and academia as a valid contribution to understanding the war. So you see, even with after the war, like the even in reconstruction, you see this with like the Dunning School, which is, I think, more Northern.

But at the time they had a different view of reconstruction than is normally portrayed.

Now.

And this was all respected. Most modern scholarship has not looked favorably on the original Lost Cause sources, nor any of the subsequent works in the same tradition. So people writing today like Edward Bonekemper, who wrote The Myth of the Lost Cause in 2015 refers to disappointed Southerners aided by many other conveniently forgetful and purposely misleading comrades spending three decades after the Civil War, creating the myth of the Lost Cause.

Bonekemper asserts at the heart of the myth is the contention that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. It had everything to do with it. Other facets of the myth include the idealization of slavery, adoration of Robert E. Lee and denigration of Ulysses S. Grant and insistence that the South had no chance of winning the war, claiming James Longstreet, not Lee, for losing the Battle of Gettysburg and condemning the North for waging total war.

Now, one quick thing was the war over slavery, right? You'll hear people say it was.

It wasn't.

That's a separate question from emancipation. It's the slavery issue, whether slavery was going to be in the Western territories, primarily being the chief one. Did that contribute to secession of the Lower South?

Yes.

Did slavery as a moral issue contribute to secession? You don't see it in the documents. This isn't really, I would say, no, not in a significant way, at least, not in a sense that you can find Southerners who are saying that they're afraid that Northerners are going to come down and free the slaves in their own states or something.

I mean, there are things you can find newspaper clippings and stuff that say that, but there wasn't like a let's go to war or let's see, let's get out of the country for a non-legal matter that relates to slavery is a morally good thing in a technical sense, in a universal.

Sense.

And because the North doesn't agree with slavery, we have to leave. I mean, you look at the Corwin Amendment, which was the other 13th Amendment, the one that would have been passed. And really, this would have enshrined slavery.

And Lincoln was willing to even do that. There's a lot of good historical evidence along these lines. So it wasn't so much about that. Really, the question about the war itself, which is, that's the main question.

What was this war about, right? Is why did Lincoln invade? Why did the North invade? What was their motivation? That's really where you can see the reason for the war. You can read Lincoln's first inaugural, and I think it's pretty clear what the reason was, at least from his perspective.

But this is something that if you say the war wasn't about slavery, then apparently Bone Kemper says, oh, it was all about slavery. Well, you have to make some jumps to get there, is what I'm trying to say.

You assume some things when you make that kind of a statement. I'm not saying it's a crazy statement, by the way. When you say the war is about slavery, the next question is, in what sense? And then have a reasonable discussion about it.

But someone can say both statements and mean different things. If you mean the war itself and not secession and say it's not about slavery, it was about a right of a state to secede or something like that, then that's actually not technically.

Incorrect.

Anyhow, modern academics' consensus is that a minimization or rejection of slavery as an issue motivated the conflict spawned and spawned the Lost Cause. William C. Davis believes that the creators of the Lost Cause myth sought to distance themselves from slavery.

Charles Dew, who teaches at Williams College and authored a 2002 bestseller, Apostles of Disunion, often cited as discrediting the pro-Southern narrative. Dew accuses Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stevens of concealing their true intentions by conspiring to avoid discussing the issue of slavery as a cause after the war, instead opting to write from the ashes of the Confederate defeat, a passionate insistence that states rights and states rights alone lay at the root of the recent conflict.

Dew's assertion is a good example of how Lost Cause authors are reinterpreted as historical innovators. So in other words, these guys like Gallagher and Bonekemper and Charles Dew and these people come along as historians and they say this was something after the fact that Southerners invented.

They needed a reason for what they just did. They knew it was wrong. And so they came up with these righteous reasons to try to downplay the real reason, which is they wanted to keep people in subjugation.

And we're going to challenge this a little bit, but this is the modern narrative of the Lost Cause and why people in historical departments across the country don't like it. It is true that in the rise and fall, Jefferson Davis cited concerning the reason for the denial of the right of the state to peaceably withdraw.

Included in this discussion was the presence and reinforcement of military fortifications in the seceded state, as well as Lincoln's call for troops. Davis leaves slavery for his discussion of secession.

Unlike Davis, Dew implicitly assumes the war was the inevitable result of secession. This connection, neither Davis nor the Lost Cause authors ever assumed. Davis further distinguished between the question of slavery serving as an occasion for secession and the question of slavery serving as a cause for secession.

Dew, like many other contemporaries, simply assumes preserving slavery was the cause. One further distinction Davis adduced was between slavery as a political question and slavery as a moral question.

Davis denied that any moral nor sentimental consideration were really involved in either the earlier or later controversies, which so long agitated and finally ruptured the union. Edward Pollard in the Lost Cause made the same distinctions.

The slavery question is not to be taken as an independent controversy in American politics. It was not a moral dispute. It was the mere incident of a sectional animosity, the causes of which lay far beyond the domain of morals.

Slavery furnished a convenient lie, a battle between the disputants. It was the most prominent ground of distinction between the two sections. It was therefore naturally seized upon as a subject of controversy, became the dominant theater of hostilities, and was at last so conspicuous and violent that occasion was mistaken for cause.

And that was merely an incident that came to be regarded as the main subject of the controversy. Choosing by default to view slavery as a moral question, Dew rhetorically asks if secession and racism are intimately connected.

This has become the standard view in both academic and popular circles. What I'm describing there is the fact that this was not just after the war. It was also during the war. You had people already trying to correct the record.

And the correction is basically that slavery may have been an occasion for conflict, but it was not the cause of the conflict itself. In other words, there were a myriad of civilizational issues between North and South that had been.

Brewing.

And the slavery gave the North a moral legitimacy later on. So if you want to talk about later, I mean, this was really after the Emancipation Proclamation that now the war is about related to, in some way, freeing slaves that are in the South.

But it didn't start out that way. And that wasn't the understanding at the outset. So this becomes a moral garb. But the moral question of slavery was not the cause. So I'm trying to think of an example of distinguishing between cause and occasion for a conflict.

I mean, when you have a fight with your significant other, wife, husband, whatever, let's say you have a disagreement over something and you're torqued, a number of things have got you going. And then sometimes the stupidest thing can become the reason.

I'm not saying slavery is stupid, by the way. But sometimes there's something that happens like he left the toilet seat up and it just becomes like you're railing each other. It's like, is that really the thing that is behind all of this?

And counselors have to get to the bottom of it. That's what the lost cause people are saying. They're saying, look, they're using this. They're saying this. But that's not the reason that we left the Union.

It's not a moral issue. And it's as a moral issue. And it's not the reason we certainly fought the war. And it's not the reason most of the Confederate soldiers fought the war who never owned slaves and didn't have a hope of owning them or holding them.

So that's my interpretation of what they're saying. In academic circles, the term lost cause had by the end of the 20th century evolved into something of a pejorative, often becoming inextricably linked with the word myth.

In 1973, Yale University historian Roland Osterweiss published The Myth of the Lost Cause, which signaled to many academics that it should not be treated as a serious theory about the war. Boehmkepper describes the myth as a collection of fictions, lies, and components that purport to explain why much of the South seceded from the Union and why the Confederacy lost the war.

He goes on to assert that after Appomattox, the myth came to dominate the historiography of the Civil War for most of the next 150 years. Now, that's kind of interesting that he says most of it. So like you have this defeated country that lost a war, and now they've somehow foisted their interpretation of that war from their poverty position on the much richer North.

It doesn't make any sense, but this is what they're saying. They're saying the South influenced the academy, it influenced pop culture, and the North just couldn't do anything about it, I guess.

I don't know.

To be clear, the employment of the term myth represents more of an academic condescension than it does an exhaustive affirmation that the narrative contains no truth value whatsoever. Osterweiss himself said that it represented the postbellum adjustment of the old chivalric concepts and the old idea of Southern cultural nationalism to the traumatic experience of devastation, defeat, poverty, and humiliation.

The lost cause, Osterweiss explains, despite its shadowy basis in empirical fact, was a romantic legend advanced in literature for the purpose of granting the South an identity to take pride in while simultaneously reshaping political and social realities.

In the 2000 book, The Myth of a Lost Cause in Civil War History, Unidiversity of Virginia historian Gary Gallagher asserts that a myth is not to be confused with a falsehood. Myths, Gallagher claims, arise when the people draw on images and symbols to construct a usable truth, which in turn permits them to deal with traumatic events such as the Confederacy's defeat.

Thus, many modern professional historians see the lost cause as a symbolic truth rather than an objective truth while opposing its influence in the culture at large. There is an especially aggressive attempt to fence it away from the ivory towers of academia.

The idea is that it may have served a purpose for 150 years, often at the expense of national unity and minority rights, but it is now time to retire the legend and, like other myths, cease retelling it until it too is gone with the wind.

So a myth in this conception is almost like a coping mechanism. It's the story you tell yourself to get through a hard time, to draw inspiration from. It's not necessarily true or false. It's not operating on that level.

It's operating on this more emotional level. But at the same time, it doesn't have to be accurate in the actual factual level. Like it doesn't actually have to comport to reality as it is. So that's a little bit about what myth means to them.

But they don't say that the myth of the northern view or anything like that, obviously. Okay, so here's a new part of the essay, the vindication motive. And this is a section where I'm going to talk a little bit about the original reason for the lost cause.

Was it really just about trying to give the South a myth to hold on to? Or were they actually trying to deal with actual facts? And the answer is the latter. Patrick Claiborne's concern in 1864 was not over whether or not southern children would be deprived of a symbolic symbol or legend by which to cope with the inevitable depressing circumstances of defeat.

Nor was Claiborne worried about blacks gaining civil rights. His own feelings before were in favor of emancipation. So he actually wanted the slaves freed. Claiborne's fear was that the historical record would be compromised by a northern version of events having the lasting effect of dishonoring the Confederate debt.