It's been it's 140 years, why does the American South still hold on so tightly to the Civil War and the Confederacy?

I'm drawing largely from Eric Foner's history of Reconstruction/Post Reconstruction which is called "Forever Free" (Foner has quite a few books on the subject but having not read them I can't reference in good faith). Foner makes the point that Reconstruction only lasted 11 (1877) years, and was only fitfully enforced at times. Thus the socially impact on the white population was largely limited to the feeling of resentment it produced. After Reconstruction ended there was began a habit/culture of attempted reconciliation between the white population of the North and South. To best facilitate this academically and socially there needed to be an explanation of the Civil War that avoided vilification. This explanation is known as the "Lost Cause" explanation. Essentially is explains the Civil War as a noble if misguided attempt by Southern leaders to assert there own culture and state's rights. Slavery was downplayed as the cause of the war while the genius, honor, and bravery of the Confederate Army/people is emphasized . This explanation of the Confederacy as a noble failure rather than as a defense of slavery was very much in force and in vogue for decades. The fact that many still assert that the American Civil War was a fight over State's Rights and not slavery can be seen as evidence of the lingering influence of the Lost Cause argument (Foner also does an effective job dissecting the Lost Cause argument and its fallacies for any who are interested). Basically it created decades of a culture wherein the Confederacy was seen as the height of Southern culture and bravery.

This is a tremendously complex topic that strikes to the very heart of regional and national identity in America today.

Historian James C. Cobb in his work Away Down South talks about how from the very beginning of the nation's history there has been a contest to create an "American" identity. To do this, however, you have to have a perceived "other" in which to contrast this new identity. As Great Britain became less suitable for this "other" role as time progressed, northern writers began to contrast the "American-ness" of industrialized, small-farm New England with the "otherness" of the South and the plantation system.

Southerners, of course, developed their own narrative of cultural identity, one in which their culture was the true "American" identity, but, as Cobb notes, southerners also had a distinct trend of identifying themselves as southerners in contrast to the north (whereas northerners tended to frame it as American vs other).

So with that cultural background we can see how sectionalism did not really die with the end of the Civil War. As the South began to recover from the exhaustion of the war (and as reconstruction "carpetbagger" and "scalawag" regimes were overthrown by white southern "redeemers"), a new war of books and letters began as white southerners sought to justify and ennoble the confederate war effort. One of the most influential of these was Jefferson Davis' Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, in which Davis sets the foundations for the southern mythology of the "Lost Cause."

Another driving force was the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the Southern Historical Society. The UDC, which had nearly 100,000 members by the end of World War I, was hugely influential in lobbying state governments for confederate monuments and cemeteries, while also engraining their vision of the war in textbooks and essay contests participated in by children throughout the South. The SHS, meanwhile, was working to immortalize southern figures such as Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, largely thanks to a series of essays by former Confederate General Jubal Early.

So by the early 20th Century, the mythos of the Lost Cause was firmly embedded in the (white) southern psyche. It was two new works during this time period, however, that would see the Lost Cause ideology explode nationally. In 1915, D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, the first true motion picture epic, glorified the Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction while portraying blacks as unintelligent, shiftless, and predatory of white women. Twenty years later, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (published in 1936, the movie came in 1939) became a national sensation while immortalizing the antebellum South.

So, with all this in mind, it can be seen how notions of the Lost Cause and antebellum greatness were thoroughly ingrained within the (again, white) southern identity and culture by the time of the Civil Rights movements. As that culture increasingly grew under attack by what white southerners saw as primarily outside, "other" agitators during the civil rights movement, the white south resisted by looking back to the civil war and earlier examples of southern resistance- such as the Confederate battle flag. That's why the Confederate flag didn't fly over the South Carolina capitol building until 1961, for example.

By this time, however, (and here I am beginning to enter into a little bit of speculation) the symbols and ideology of the Lost Cause had become so intwined with southern identity that for many southerners they were more than symbols of war, oppression, and Jim Crow, but of southern heritage as a whole-the good as well as the bad. Therefore, when groups attack symbols like the Confederate flag or Lee-Jackson day, many southerners (especially older, more conservative ones) feel that their entire heritage and culture is being attacked.