"Lost Cause" Myth

"Lost Cause" Myth*

It did not take long for southern newspaper editors to launch the "Lost Cause" myth.

Note the following from the accompanying newspaper item:

"The radicals sometimes declare that the negroes are the only loyal people in the South, but the Southern people believe that, during the war, the colored people were about as loyal to the Confederacy as any class."

"Caswell County Black Mail Carrier." The Day Book (Norfolk, VA), 21 June 1866.

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* The Lost Cause of the Confederacy is an American pseudohistorical negationist mythology that claims, among other things, the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery. Source: Encyclopedia Britannica.

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Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth by Kevin M. Levin (2019).

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army.

But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil War and a rising backlash against African Americans’ gains in civil rights and other realms.

Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.

AWARDS & DISTINCTIONS

2019 Eugene Feit Award for Excellence in Civil War Studies, New York Military Affairs Symposium

Levin, Kevin M. Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

The idea of faithful slaves in the Old South has been one of the most tenacious myths in American history. Slaves' fidelity to their masters' cause -- a falsehood constructed to support claims that the war was not about slavery -- has long formed one of the staple arguments in Lost Cause ideology. In dealing with such myths, historians often analyze their tenacity instead of their veracity.

In recent decades, the neo-Confederate fringe of Civil War enthusiasm (with tentative support from some academic historians) has contended that thousands of African Americans, slave and free, willingly joined the Confederate war effort as soldiers and fought for their "homeland." A quasi-debate over the existence of "black Confederates" has seeped into academic conferences, historical journals and many Web sites.

The issue of competing popular memories is driven largely by the desire of current white supremacists to re-legitimize the Confederacy while tacitly rejecting the victories of the modern civil rights movement. What could better buttress the claims of "color-blind conservatism" in our own time than the notion that the slaveholding leaders of the Confederacy were themselves the true emancipators and that many slaves were devoted to the Southern rebellion?

George Orwell warned us: Who needs real history when you can control public language and political debate? This book is a scholarly, well-written demolition of the invented tradition of "black Confederates." Levine's intrepid research overwhelms the myth, although it will never kill it as long as such stories reinforce current social needs and political agendas.

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Lost Cause, an interpretation of the American Civil War viewed by most historians as a myth that attempts to preserve the honor of the South by casting the Confederate defeat in the best possible light. It attributes the loss to the overwhelming Union advantage in manpower and resources, nostalgically celebrates an antebellum South of supposedly benevolent slave owners and contented enslaved people, and downplays or altogether ignores slavery as the cause of war. It became the philosophical foundation for the racial violence and terrorism employed to reverse Reconstruction and for the reimposition of white supremacy in the Jim Crow era. Its acceptance in the North as well as in the South facilitated national reunion following the war but at the cost of the civil rights of African Americans.