It isn't hard to understand how the Lost Cause would appeal and grow in the South, but what do you see as the driving force behind it gaining such penetration into the North? Rebel flags flying proudly in Michigan or Maine, and exhortations of "Heritage Not Hate" from Washington or Montana... I know your focus is on North Carolina, but do you have any thoughts on why Confederate apologia it is such a national myth?

Hi there Adam! I'm one of our resident experts on slavery here at AskHistorians, but I'm a labour historian and comparativist whose main research home is the British Caribbean, so the Civil War and all the intricacies of American slavery politics go beyond my wheelhouse.

Obviously, it's a popular trope of the Lost Cause narrative that the vast majority of Confederate soldiers and officials couldn't be fighting in defence of slavery because they didn't own slaves, and so must have been motivated by other factors. We know this is simply not true and that the institution of racial slavery helped to provide a sense of racial identity and superiority that transcended class boundaries; that slave ownership was an aspirational goal for many; and that the number of people who benefited directly from slave labour was dramatically higher than the superficial count of legal slave owners would imply, to say nothing of the indirect beneficiaries.

But I'm curious: how early on did this notion that slavery was something only the elite had intimate knowledge of and benefit from take hold, and how quickly did the idea of your average Confederate soldier or Southern citizen being almost completely ignorant of slavery except as "something that happens on the big plantations of rich folk" cement itself as a key pillar of the Lost Cause narrative we see today?

Hi! Thank you for doing this. I've heard that some textbooks were labeled "Unfair To The South" for their depiction of the war or slavery - was this connected to the Dunning school who vilified Reconstruction, or something different?

Have recent debates had much of an impact on confederate monuments either being removed or being critically contextualized (like some people have talked about during recent debates)?

Hi! Thanks for coming on and doing this AMA. What was the reaction of African-Americans to the erection of Confederate monuments? Were these monuments made to be primarily placed in white areas, or were they also imposed on POC communities?

You mention a myth of unwavering support for the Confederacy among white southerners. Was there a centralized effort to create this myth or did it arise from multiple groups trying to suppress dissent independently?

I've heard conflicting accounts about the number or percentage of private homes burned down during the "burning of Atlanta". Was the entire city burned to the ground, or were private homes mostly spared?

The most shocking take on the US Civil War I've heard did not come from a Klansman. A left-leaning sociology professor said that both sides fought for economic systems that benefited them: slavery-based agrarian economy in the South and industrialized, free worker-based one in the North. And since both the Union and Confederacy fought for equally selfish motives, it is wrong to say that one side was better or worse than the other.

It happened years ago, but I am still in shock. Can you help me formulate a response?

I realise this might be beyond the scope of your research, but perhaps you'll at least be able to point me in some interesting directions.

In my own reading on Victorian Racial thought in the late nineteenth century, one thing that strikes me is the extent to which educated Britons, Australians and New Zealanders absolutely bought into the Southern view of Reconstruction.

I have some idea of when white Southerners won the intellectual peace in America- but how quickly did their views penetrate the wider consciousness overseas?

I tried to answer as many questions as I could and hopefully, provided some useful info! You can follow me on twitter at @adamhdomby if you want to ask more questions or learn more about my research or best of all, buy a copy of the book:The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (UVA Press). Thank you everyone and I apologize to any I missed (I am new to this reddit thing). Everyone stay healthy, stay six feet apart, and wash your hands frequently.

I'm curious if you know why the Battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia is the most commonly used symbol for the Confederacy now instead of the actual national flags?

Thank you for doing this AMA! I was struck while living outside the South, NYC, how just accepted a lot of confederate imagery was as just a part of the landscape by non-southerners, and this got me thinking.

How has the presence of pop cultural representations of apolitical pop-culture imagery, such as Dukes of Hazard driven perceptions of the Lost Cause and associated Confederate apologia as mere Southern cultural expressions, especially outside of the South?

Thank you for doing this AMA. What were the causes of the civil war and was the war inevitable as Ken Burns documentary said it was?

Thank you for doing this AMA; your book looks fascinating. I've two sets of questions for you today:

1. I believe that the construction of the Lincoln Memorial started around the same time as D.W. Griffith beginning to film The Birth of a Nation, both coming at the heels of the first great wave of Confederate monuments. Was the Lincoln Memorial's construction a response to the rise of the Lost Cause? And if not, how should we view the Lincoln Memorial in the context of Confederate monuments? What did Lost Cause proponents think of the Lincoln Memorial?

2. I've never been to any plantations before, but from what I've read, many plantation museums are trapped between the need to educate visitors about slavery and the need to generate revenue by exploiting that romanticized vision of the "Old South"--I might be wrong, but I believe only a single plantation (in Louisiana) is focused solely on slavery, treating the site like an American concentration camp. What do you think plantation museums can do to put the issue of slavery front and center?

Thank you!

Edit: actually, one more question if that's possible: do you see openings for future scholarship on the Lost Cause from a transnational or comparative context?

Aside from your own of course, which is already near the top of my 'to-read' list, what other essential reading would you recommend for the topic of the Lost Cause and Civil War memory?

Hello,

How common is it for you to have students which believe in a Lost Cause narrative of the war when they enter your class? Has this gotten more or less common in recent years?

I'm especially curious about this because when I was in primary school in a SE US state, my textbook mentioned that "states' rights" was a main cause of the war, and I didn't realize the larger political/history argument that was underneath that statement until much later in life.

What percentage of slave owners were women? Is it fair to say white women in America have largely gotten a pass for the slave trade? Their role is very rarely discussed and most of the blame is usually reserved for white men. Why?

Do you know of a set of online sources that educators could use so that students could see the manufactured nature of the myth?

Does your book and/or research show any atrocities perpetrated by troops against civilians during reconstruction?

Don't you think that, in retrospect, the leaders of the rebellion should have been executed for treason? I come from a southern family and I've recently begun to believe that if my ancestors were wiped out and replaced by northerners, America would be a better place today. Is there any truth to that?

Why is Robert E Lee seen as a hero(?) or a moral/just man in the national memory of the civil war? I think this has lessened in the past decade by a lot but I never remember anyone speaking negatively of him in my entire education or until the 2010s (in the kinda south). Why does someone like Jefferson Davis or Stonewall Jackson not receive the same treatment? Why is Lee still seen as a “good guy” in the black and white/good bad way we teach the civil war to children?

How do you see the role of mass media continuing and even exaggerating elements of the lost cause? Examples such as 'Birth of a nation' and 'gone with the wind'? As a student of history, media and memory are both incredibly complex and intertwined in my experience.

Hey, I have a question from my father regarding Confederate military practice;

How did Lee feed his troops after Shenandoah Valley supplies stopped? What was their diet like?

Thanks for doing this Q and A, it's been a brilliant read!

I assume you teach a Civil War era course. If so, how do you unveil the Lost Cause ideology? Do you start with it - as importantly inflecting our understanding of the cause, course, and settlement of the war (ie the memory(ies) of the era), or do you unveil it more towards the end as a Reconstruction Era phenomenon?

Hello Dr. Thanks for doing this

Why were the Union so set on removing slavery that they were willing to go to war over it?

Was it purely humanitarian?

Was this a widespread sentment in the North and what would the average Union soldier have thought about it?

Thanks for doing this. Could you comment on the status of free elections in the South prior to the Civil War? I’ve heard that if you were found to have voted not in line with the local plantation boss that you would find yourself economically worse off or physically threatened.

Are there any good primary source documents that are not very well known about some of the most prominent members of the Daughters of the Confederacy? (looking to write a paper on them)

Thanks for doing this AMA, this is a topic I have a lot of personal interest in and struggle to find good answers. My question is do you think thank House Resolution 194 (110th): Apologizing for the enslavement and racial segregation of African-Americans, passed in 2009, was a significant step or had any kind of impact? While the measure seems to be well intentioned, it does not seem to get much attention in schools or elsewhere.

Hi! Are you aware of a similar "Lost Cause" phenomenon being so widespread, pervasive and influential anywhere else on the globe and in history? Germany in the aftermath of WW1 (and perhaps even WW2) sort of comes to mind but ultimately does not seem to have reached anywhere near the levels of the Confederate cause and its impact on US history. Perhaps there are other examples?

First off, thanks for sharing your knowledge with this AMA. This isn't quite a question about Lost Cause ideology so apologies if this is too far out of your expertise:

Some of the larger Confederate apologia has focused much attention on the vanishingly small number of black Confederate soldiers, which as I understand were mostly free blacks acting as local police in their own communities & didn't actually fight in battle. When did the Lost Cause/Confederate aplogist historiography shift from the Confederacy being a whites-only organization to trying to say it was inclusive and it was the Union with its segregated units that were the "real" racists?

What are your thoughts about authors like Faulkner, Welty, or Baldwin that sort of discuss the existence of persistent racism and persistent glorification of the Old South in their works? Do they provide accurate insight or are they missing anything in particular?

Also, at what points in time did memorials to these Confederate soldiers go up? I've generally heard that they are significantly after the Civil War, often used as an intimidation tactic toward former slaves and their descendants, but I figured it'd be important to fact-check that one.

Thanks for doing this AMA!

Large areas of my county had significant Black rural populations after reconstruction. By the 1870's and 80's the populations were robust enough to build Black schools and churches. Of course these rural Black populations (20% of my county's census in 1870) evaporated during the Great Migration. But I wonder how ex-slaves were able to acquire rural land? Was it simply given to them, were there public programs, were they allowed to buy it, etc? I'm in Missouri if it makes any difference.

We hear about the slavery/lost cause roots of many American institutions such as the electoral collage, and even the make up of the senate. What are some of the biggest legacies of the lost cause that are still part of our current mainstream culture, and not just that of the South.

I don't really know much about the US Civil War (I'm from Belarus) other than what I've picked up on this subreddit, so I've got a whole bunch of questions.

I've seen photos of veterans' reunions from decades after the war ended. How were Confederate veterans perceived when the war was still in living memory? And what did veterans from both sides say was their motivator for fighting?

How exactly did Reconstruction fail? Did the federal government just give up and let the South do whatever they wanted? And did the rise of the KKK directly affect policy decisions? How was Reconstruction remembered in both North and South, and was it remembered at all?

This may be outside your area of expertise, but how was the war perceived in Russia? Or, if that's too out there, in other countries, such as Britain?

I've noticed some parallel between the Lost Cause myth and the post-WW2 Clean Wehrmacht myth. In particupar, both were attempts to whitewash widespread complicity in the evils perpetrated by a defeated government, and both were originally promoted in large part via the memiors of surviving military and political leaders.

For the Clean Wehrmacht in particular, the western allies tactilly supported the myth in order to help reconcile with their defeated enemies. Was there a similar dynamic at work for the Lost Cause myth?

Southerners biblically justified slavery before and during the Civil War. What was their theological rationalization for why God had apparently allowed the North to free the slaves and why repression should continue in a different form (Jim Crow laws)?

Why is the popular memory of the Civil War so focused on some parts of the war but not others (in ways that seem to go beyond a simple East-West dichotomy)? Why is Bull Run a household name but not Spotsylvania? Why is the largest Confederate victory of the war (Chickamauga) elided over in popular histories in favor of lesser Southern victories like Fredericksburg? Why did Sherman’s March to the Sea enter pop culture but not the much more destructive Carolinas Campaign? Why is Franklin or Cold Harbor not as famous as Pickett’s Charge? Why did the GAR not succeed as much as Confederate veterans in valorizing wartime heroism?

Hi! Thank you for doing this AMA. We see the beginnings of the Lost Cause shortly after the end of the war, particularly with Confederate veterans groups that quickly utilized public rallies, textbook committees, and of course memorials. To what extant (if at all) did Union veterans attempt to fight this narrative?

Could you tell us if their were any Bushwackers who refused to surrender and continued resisting occupation in the south?

Forgive my ignorance, I never studied American history in great depth, but within the passage regarding the Lost Cause, it outlines strongly that the Confederates were very much pro Slavery, rather than simply the perpetuation of their way of life. Was this a universal goal of all troops, or was the aim of perpetuating slavery not as much as a considered goal amongst the lower ranks of the Confederate army?

In short, were the lower ranking troops knowingly fighting for slavery, or were they moreso answering the call to arms of others who had that goal?

explain the difference; confederate statues, vs statues of British generals who conquered India?

I've learned about "shay's rebellion" and The ww1 soldier's who were looking for benefits during the great depression who were forcibly removed from the national mall.

Was their anything similar for civil war soldiers both on the confederate side and the union side?

What do you think about the book "The Killer Angels"? I have heard about this book and know it's about an event in the Civil War

I've heard that slavery was a dying institution and needed to expand to survive. Why was that?

I don’t want to get too political, but do you see some of these ideologies being validated and promoted by the current US president?

How do you see this narrative being pushed presently?

What color is your toothbrush?