As Christmastime approaches, it is appropriate to recover the surprising role of a Hobart College (as HWS was known in the 1800s) student in the late 19th century movement we call the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause.”
The Lost Cause involved writers, newspapers, organizations such as the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, politicians, church figures, and others. The overwhelming percentage of its proponents were from the former slave states of the U.S. South, but some Yankees disseminated its ideology too. Its main purposes were to honor Confederate officers and common soldiers of the Civil War, dwell on their heroism, and memorialize them with statues and monuments — many of which like the one of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond have been recently fought over and often removed. But it also was driven by a racialized and regional southern ideology.
In the process of venerating the Confederacy and its surviving veterans, the women and men who generated Lost Cause propaganda also sought to justify the very decision of 11 slave states to leave the Union following Abraham Lincoln’s presidential election in 1860 that caused the Civil War in the first place. This bid for a national southern independence, as we now know, eventuated in the wartime deaths of over 700,000 soldiers, not to mention the enormous property destruction it brought and the physical and psychological wounds its survivors bore long afterwards. Advocates of the Lost Cause wanted to exculpate the onetime slave states from responsibility for this gore, and one way to do this was to legitimize the secession process itself.
Since slavery generated most of the South’s wealth before the war and since the southern states divided the nation because they perceived Lincoln’s election as an abolitionist threat, Lost Cause propaganda sought to portray the pre-Civil War South’s system of abusive human bondage in the gentlest light possible: Masters and mistresses of enslaved people were presented as kindly and generous; all enslaved........