Lost causes, found reasons
Cognitive need and Confederate Heritage Month in 2025
In 1911 a University of Florida professor named Enoch Banks published a scholarly monograph entitled “A Semi-Centennial View of Secession.” Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Confederacy’s founding, the article posited that in the Civil War “the North was relatively in the right, while the South was relatively in the wrong.”
Making such an assertion in print brought a storm of condemnation down on Banks, a Georgia native and Emory graduate who earned his Ph.D. at Columbia. The Jacksonville Florida Times-Union editorialized that allowing Banks to instruct “a generation of men and women…is to grow anarchists by wholesale and to give moral consent to the subversion of government.”
Jacksonville’s chapter of the United Confederate Veterans charged that Banks was teaching Florida natives “that their fathers were either fools, knaves, or traitors.” The United Daughters of the Confederacy called on the University of Florida to fire the professor. The university’s president feared the controversy was imperiling “the very life of the institution.” When Banks turned in his resignation the university administration was both relieved that the controversy was over and no less embarrassed for having caved so completely.
These same disputes linger still: April 2025 was Confederate Heritage Month in the state of Mississippi. The governor signed a proclamation to that effect on the 17th of the month and in so doing continued a tradition dating to 1993.
Confederate Heritage Month is an uncommonly under-promoted observance. The only evidence that it’s an official commemoration in Mississippi is a screenshot of the governor’s proclamation posted to the Sons of Confederate Veterans Facebook page. “Each year,” the Mississippi Free Press reports, “the Confederate Heritage Month proclamations appear on SCV Facebook pages, but neither the governor nor any other state official publicizes the proclamations or posts them on any public-facing websites or social-media pages.”
The 2025 proclamation asked “all Americans” to “gain insight from our mistakes and successes” while earnestly striving “to understand and appreciate our heritage and our opportunities which lie before us.” If such verbiage is banal in the abstract, it’s also part of a tradition as old as the war itself.
“Heritage” shares an etymology with “inherit,” and part of American heritage is a war fought over slavery. We find this inheritance in official state declarations of secession (Mississippi: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world”) and, more notoriously, in the Cornerstone Speech delivered in March 1861 by the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens.
Like an inheritance when the last will and testament is unsealed, any heritage can be contested. After the war an ambitious revisionist telling of the national heritage arose almost literally overnight. Though it’s been nearly a quarter-century since David W. Blight published Race and Reunion, his work still stands as the best introduction to a remarkable tale of motivated historical revision. Blight detailed how, if far from universal, the postwar desire among whites to clasp hands over the so-called bloody chasm was most certainly national. Nevertheless the states of the former Confederacy did lead the way in contesting the historical record.
In April 1865 the devastation in Richmond was so complete that one of the city’s leading newspapers, the Dispatch, didn’t resume publication until that December. With its very first postbellum issue, however, the Dispatch asserted that the war had actually been fought over states’ rights.
This version of events proved to be a remarkably serviceable and durable retelling of the story. Some six decades later a Unity Monument would be dedicated at the spot in Bennett Place, North Carolina, where in 1865 Confederate general Joseph Johnston surrendered his Army of the Tennessee to Union general William Tecumseh Sherman.1 According to the Unity Monument’s inscription, Johnston’s capitulation signaled the resolution of two competing visions of governance.
This monument thus marks the spot where the military force of the United States of America finally triumphed and established as inviolate the principle of of an indissoluble Union. It marks also the spot of the last stand of the Confederacy in maintaining its ideal of indestructible states — an ideal which preserved to the American union by virtue of the heroic fight grows in strength from year to year.
This Lost Cause narration of history is necessarily and completely blind to the unapologetic defenses of slavery as an institution that rang out in all their official ignominy in the secession winter of 1860-61. What’s less commonly noted in any telling, however, is that for much of the 1850s and right up to Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration mentions of “states’ rights” were likely to be understood as pertaining to the North and not the South.
Far from fearing federal overreach, southerners expended a good deal of political effort and congressional rhetoric in the late antebellum era demanding that their rights be guaranteed by and secured through a supreme national government in Washington. States’ rights could not guarantee that a planter’s trip through or sojourn in a free state with enslaved persons would go off without complication. On the southern view such matters demanded an expressly federal remedy.
For their part northerners insisted that their rights as sovereign states be upheld and preserved. One of the most impassioned defenses of states’ rights came not from a southern fire-eater but from famed Boston intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson in opposition to what he referred to as the new fugitive slave law of 1850.
I had never in my life up to this time suffered from the Slave Institution. Slavery in Virginia or Carolina was like slavery in Africa or the Feejees, for me. There was an old fugitive slave law, but it had become, or was fast becoming a dead letter, and, by the genius and laws of Massachusetts, inoperative. The new Bill made it operative, required me to hunt slaves, and it found citizens in Massachusetts willing to act as judges and captors. Moreover, it discloses the secret of the new times that Slavery was no longer mendicant, but was becoming aggressive and dangerous.
After the war Jefferson Davis famously and disingenuously claimed slavery had been the occasion but not the cause of secession. One might better use this same wording with reference to Lincoln’s election. Southerners in the winter of 1860-61 had few if any grievances to lay at the door of a federal government that had brought them the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Dred Scott.
For southerners supporting secession it was instead northern states that were the problem. On this view Lincoln’s election marked a point of no return despite his repeated pledges not to “interfere” with slavery where it already existed. For the first time since the administration of John Quincy Adams the restive free states would not be counterbalanced by a proslavery (or at least anti-anti-slavery) president.
In the war’s aftermath the deep cognitive need of southern apologists flipped the preexisting geographic divide on states’ rights neatly on its head. Now the Lost Cause version of history lavished care and attention on states’ rights and indeed on secession itself, a momentous and historic but still purely tactical calculation made in the political arena. Colonel Richard Henry Lee captured the revisionist ethos succinctly in 1893: “We were not rebels; we did not fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes.”2
Such premises, the ones Enoch Banks challenged at his peril in 1911 and which Gunnar Myrdal later termed “false beliefs with a purpose,” persist into the 21st century. Rather than commemorating any common national inheritance, the continued existence of a Confederate Heritage Month in 2025 signifies a particular instance of a universal urge to fashion and if need be hammer the past into a shape of our liking.
Johnston surrendered to Sherman on April 26, more than two weeks after Lee’s capitulation to Grant at Appomattox Court House. By some accounts the signing of terms at Bennett Place therefore constitutes a satisfactory date to mark as the end of the war.
Ironically the actual 1866 book entitled The Lost Cause was on this score less myopic. In his pro-southern screed Edward A. Pollard vowed to oppose “Negro equality” forever even as he granted that which Lost Cause mythology cannot grant, that the war decided “the excision of slavery.”