We should reject the "Lost Cause of the South" myth once and for all

[Politruk]

Our new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, as part of the War on Woke, just changed the name of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg. A United States Army base, named after a Confederate general. *

I would not suggest the Confederate soldiers were bad men. No doubt most of them were good men by the standards of their time and place -- certainly they were brave men, to keep up a fight against such odds for four years. But they fought in a cause that does not deserve any public honor or valorization.

Every Confederate monument should come down, except for that bas-relief on Stone Mountain -- the only Confederate monument I've ever seen that has any artistic value. Most of those monuments were erected in the early 20th Century -- not to honor Confederate soldiers, but as a public assertion of white supremacy.

The South fought the Civil War to preserve slavery -- not for "freedom" in the form of "states' rights." The Southern states started announcing their secession as soon as Lincoln was elected. Before he had done anything to threaten their internal autonomy. Before he had even taken office. So it is nonsense to claim they fought for "states' rights."

And Lincoln was not really an abolitionist. If the Southern states had not seceded, he would have done nothing to threaten their "peculiar institution." At most, he would have vetoed the admission of any new slave states to the Union.

The Southern leaders knew all this. They just did not care to remain in a union where it was possible for a party with an abolitionist wing to win the presidency.


* The order includes a weasel-clause, however: This time, the base is not named for General Braxton Bragg, CSA, but PFC Roland Bragg, who served in WWII. Officially, that is.

 

[Politruk]

Lost Cause of the South:

The term Lost Cause of the South (also Lost Cause of the Confederacy) refers to a number of interpretations of the American Civil War from an effectively pro-Southern perspective. All wars in history have had complex, nuanced reasons for their occurrence, but the idea of the "Lost Cause" is a classic example of denialism, where the conflict is reframed to minimize or even completely ignore the primary cause of the Civil War; the existence of slavery. This mythos makes reference to a number of different themes, and these appear in various pop culture sources and persist to this day.

Almost immediately after the war ended in 1865, the defeated Southern states had to form a coherent reason why they had engaged in a rebellion against the Union.[note 2] Such reason could not highlight the centrality of slavery to the Southern cause, but instead had to minimize, or even deny, the role of slavery. The first appearance of the term "Lost Cause" was in the 1866 book by Edward A. Pollard, deceptively titled The Lost Cause: A New Southern History Of The War Of The Confederates as there was no such book that preceded it.[6][7]:156 Pollard laid the groundwork for the Lost Cause mythos: defending white supremacy, arguing that slavery was not a cause of the war, arguing for States' rights based on the Tenth Amendment, and that slavery was necessary to prevent race war.[7]:157 For Pollard, the Civil War only decided two things, the restoration of the Union and the end to slavery — not equality of the races, or voting rights for African Americans.[7]:157

The literature promoting what was to become the Lost Cause mythos can be traced to the revisionist 1890 book Why the solid South?,[8] which argued that Black voters only wanted government money and that the Black Republican dominated governments during Reconstruction were corrupt.[9]:129 The ideas in the book were later promoted by Thomas Dixon in 1906[9]:138 (Dixon later wrote the book that inspired the racist film The Birth of a Nation). Also beginning in 1896, steel baron James Ford Rhodes wrote a 7-volume revisionist history of Reconstruction, History of the United States from the compromise of 1850.[10][9]:138 Rhodes history came under contemporaneous and substantive criticism by historian John R. Lynch,https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/Wikipedia%27s_W.svg/12px-Wikipedia%27s_W.svg.png but despite this, Rhodes' revisionist view of Reconstruction was taken up by William Archibald Dunning, a political theorist at Columbia University, as part of the Dunning Schoolhttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/Wikipedia%27s_W.svg/12px-Wikipedia%27s_W.svg.png of historiography.[9]:138-139

Furthermore, many white Southerners during Reconstruction (1865-1877) believed that the Union had, in fact, placed an oppressive regime on their states. Union troops left the South at the end of Reconstruction, but the bulk of Confederate memorials were not built until after the beginning of the Jim Crow era in the 1890s.[11] The memorials were often funded and driven by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and supported by many Southern veterans' groups.[12] The purpose of this was to try and redefine the meaning of the war to ignore slavery, so that the Southern "heroes" would not seem like evil racists seeking to hold down an entire race of people. A very good example of this is how Robert E. Lee is often played up as being opposed to slavery and only fighting for the Confederacy because his home state of Virginia joined the Confederacy, which ignores the fact he himself actually owned slaves and refused to ever release them, punishing them brutally when they tried to escape.

The myth as laid out by Jefferson Davis drew on contemporary trends in its portrayal of an idyllic rural South opposed to the industrial North. It was influenced by naive Romanticism, in particular the writings of the Scottish Tory novelist Walter Scott, several of whose stories referred to the defeat of the Jacobite pretenders in Britain; these books were popular in the South before and during the Civil War. In 1869, Davis travelled through Britain to Culloden, site of the Jacobites' ultimate defeat in 1746, to pay his respects and reflect on an earlier lost cause.[13] Many Scots had emigrated to New World, particularly the Carolinas, and Davis praised the Scottish heritage of Stonewall Jackson and John C. Calhoun. An 1875 lecture published as Scotland and the Scottish People celebrated what he identified as the Scots and Irish love of tradition, and gave them as examples of glory in defeat, while recasting the war in Romantic terms as a defeat of rural tradition by brutal modern armies, and nothing to do with slavery.[14]

 

[Politruk]

There are still Lost Cause morons on the PB, believe it or not.

 

[Politruk]

xxx

 

[Politruk]

Some Lost-Causers insist the Civil War was really about economics. E.g., the Whigs, and later the Republicans, favored a protective tariff -- good for the industrial North, bad for the agrarian South.

But all differences between North and South went back to slavery one way or another. The South was culturally committed to an agrarian way of life based on slave labor -- that froze out industrialization.

 

[Politruk]

N.B.: There are no Lost Causers who are not white supremacists. None at all.

After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Trump tried to draw a distinction between the "Jews will not replace us!" white nationalists, and historical preservationists who just wanted to keep the Lee statue for its historic value. But no such distinction exists.

 

[Politruk]

The best source here is What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President, by Michael Lind.

 

[Rightguide]

Our new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, as part of the War on Woke, just changed the name of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg. A United States Army base, named after a Confederate general. *

I would not suggest the Confederate soldiers were bad men. No doubt most of them were good men by the standards of their time and place -- certainly they were brave men, to keep up a fight against such odds for four years. But they fought in a cause that does not deserve any public honor or valorization.

Every Confederate monument should come down, except for that bas-relief on Stone Mountain -- the only Confederate monument I've ever seen that has any artistic value. Most of those monuments were erected in the early 20th Century -- not to honor Confederate soldiers, but as a public assertion of white supremacy.

The South fought the Civil War to preserve slavery -- not for "freedom" in the form of "states' rights." The Southern states started announcing their secession as soon as Lincoln was elected. Before he had done anything to threaten their internal autonomy. Before he had even taken office. So it is nonsense to claim they fought for "states' rights."

And Lincoln was not really an abolitionist. If the Southern states had not seceded, he would have done nothing to threaten their "peculiar institution." At most, he would have vetoed the admission of any new slave states to the Union.

The Southern leaders knew all this. They just did not care to remain in a union where it was possible for a party with an abolitionist wing to win the presidency.


* The order includes a weasel-clause, however: This time, the base is not named for General Braxton Bragg, CSA, but PFC Roland Bragg, who served in WWII. Officially, that is.

People in Southern towns and cities have a right to remember their forebears, not as caricatures, but as human beings shaped by the tragedies, loyalties, and conflicts of their time. Those statues represent more than a war over slavery; they mark bloodlines, sacrifice, and a fiercely held sense of place. The bones of fathers and grandfathers rest in that soil, men who fought, rightly or wrongly, for what they believed was home, honor, and survival. To erase that history, as you suggest, is not justice, it’s amnesia dressed as virtue. A mature nation doesn’t sanitize its past; it confronts it, wrestles with it, and remembers it in full.

 

[Politruk]

To erase that history, as you suggest

It will never be erased. There will never be an American generation that does not learn about the Civil War in high-school history. But they should never be taught that history from a pro-Confederate point of view -- which used to be typical in Southern schools.

 

[Rightguide]

It will never be erased. There will never be an American generation that does not learn about the Civil War in high-school history. But they should never be taught that history from a pro-Confederate point of view -- which used to be typical in Southern schools.

We don’t need left-wing radicals rewriting history to impose guilt by ancestry, a modern-day corruption of blood meant to shame future generations for the sins of the past. True historical reckoning requires honesty, not ideological cleansing.

I know you feel a people severed from their roots, by force or manipulation, become easier to control, easier to demoralize, and easier to remake in someone else’s image. History should inform, not be weaponized. And the legacy of a nation should not be surrendered to those who see its past only as a tool for reeducation and revenge.

 

[Politruk]

We don’t need left-wing radicals rewriting history to impose guilt by ancestry, a modern-day corruption of blood meant to shame future generations for the sins of the past.

Nobody wants that, least of all left-wing radicals, who are not involved in this at all.

 

[kyblue12]

“I know you feel a people severed from their roots, by force or manipulation, become easier to control, easier to demoralize, and easier to remake in someone else’s image.”

Kinda ironic in a discussion of the sins of the south don’t you think?

 

[Politruk]

“I know you feel a people severed from their roots, by force or manipulation, become easier to control, easier to demoralize, and easier to remake in someone else’s image.”

Kinda ironic in a discussion of the sins of the south don’t you think?

Oh, yeah, that's another thing . . .

 

[Politruk]

Why Gods and Generals is Neo-Confederate Propaganda (and Objectively Sucks)

 

[YDB95]

People in Southern towns and cities have a right to remember their forebears, not as caricatures, but as human beings shaped by the tragedies, loyalties, and conflicts of their time. Those statues represent more than a war over slavery; they mark bloodlines, sacrifice, and a fiercely held sense of place. The bones of fathers and grandfathers rest in that soil, men who fought, rightly or wrongly, for what they believed was home, honor, and survival. To erase that history, as you suggest, is not justice, it’s amnesia dressed as virtue. A mature nation doesn’t sanitize its past; it confronts it, wrestles with it, and remembers it in full.

Tell you what, Reichguide: why don't you go to Germany and tell them there ought to be statues of Hitler to remind them of their history? Let's see how that goes over.

 

[Rebel5soul]

Excellent!!!!!! The vets never stopped calling it Bragg. And those that don't like it can resign their commission or demand a general discharge. Fuck the Pansies.

 

[Lazaran]

“I know you feel a people severed from their roots, by force or manipulation, become easier to control, easier to demoralize, and easier to remake in someone else’s image.”

Kinda ironic in a discussion of the sins of the south don’t you think?

Racistguide has zero awareness…

 

[Politruk]

Excellent!!!!!! The vets never stopped calling it Bragg. And those that don't like it can resign their commission or demand a general discharge. Fuck the Pansies.

Pansies?

 

[Rebel5soul]

Pansies?

Yup, Pansies. It wasn't the military that was all hand wringing about those names.

 

[Politruk]

Yup, Pansies. It wasn't the military that was all hand wringing about those names.

It was patriots.

 

[dmallord]

Hope Springs had a great donut shop just off post. One of the few things I enjoyed about Bragg.

 

[Rebel5soul]

It was patriots.

Yeah, right.

 

[Rightguide]

Tell you what, Reichguide: why don't you go to Germany and tell them there ought to be statues of Hitler to remind them of their history? Let's see how that goes over.

The old, “Confederates equal Hitler” routine, how original. Do you get a sticker every time you invoke Godwin’s Law, or is it habit at this point? Germany doesn’t need statues of Hitler because he led a regime of industrial genocide. You’re comparing farmers, conscripts, and flawed men defending their states, however misguided, to the architect of the Holocaust. That’s not historical analysis; it’s intellectual cosplay. But sure, keep swinging that moral sledgehammer. Just don’t confuse smashing statues with understanding history. The South’s dead weren’t saints, but they weren’t Nazis either. If you can't tell the difference, you probably shouldn't be the one deciding what gets remembered.

 

[Politruk]

Yeah, right.

It is patriotic not to want an Army base named after a traitor.

 

[Politruk]

The old, “Confederates equal Hitler” routine, how original. Do you get a sticker every time you invoke Godwin’s Law, or is it habit at this point? Germany doesn’t need statues of Hitler because he led a regime of industrial genocide. You’re comparing farmers, conscripts, and flawed men defending their states, however misguided, to the architect of the Holocaust. That’s not historical analysis; it’s intellectual cosplay. But sure, keep swinging that moral sledgehammer. Just don’t confuse smashing statues with understanding history. The South’s dead weren’t saints, but they weren’t Nazis either. If you can't tell the difference, you probably shouldn't be the one deciding what gets remembered.

Point is, there are no monuments in Germany to Hitler's soldiers -- who were in no relevant way different from the way you have described Confederate soldiers. They may have been brave and patriotic and honorable, but the nature of the regime they fought for precludes their public valorization.