The South Was Right!

Product Information

Trenton's Flag Loophole – Dixie Outfitters". Archived from the original on July 2, 2020 . Retrieved July 1, 2020. According to the historian Kenneth M. Stampp, each side supported states' rights or stronger federal power only when it was convenient for it to do so. [140] Stampp cited Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens as an example of a Southern leader who, when the war began, said that slavery was the " cornerstone of the Confederacy", but after the defeat of the Confederacy said, in A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, that the war had been not about slavery but about states' rights. Stephens became one of the most ardent defenders of the Lost Cause myth. [141] Coates, Ta-Nehisi (June 23, 2015). "What This Cruel War Was Over The meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the words of those who bore it". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on May 13, 2019 . Retrieved June 13, 2017.

There were two intense periods of Lost Cause activity: the first was around the turn of the 20th century, when efforts were made to preserve the memories of Confederate veterans, who were dying off at the time, and the second was during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in reaction to growing public support for racial equality. Through actions such as building prominent Confederate monuments and writing history textbooks, Lost Cause organizations (including the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans) sought to ensure Southern whites would know what they called the "true" narrative of the Civil War, and therefore continue to support white supremacist policies such as Jim Crow laws. [9] [19] In that regard, white supremacy is a central feature of the Lost Cause narrative. [19] Origins

Current Discussions

The basic assumptions of the Lost Cause have proved durable for many in the modern South. The Lost Cause tenets frequently emerge during controversies surrounding public display of the Confederate flag and various state flags. The historian John Coski noted that the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), the "most visible, active, and effective defender of the flag", "carried forward into the twenty-first century, virtually unchanged, the Lost Cause historical interpretations and ideological vision formulated at the turn of the twentieth". [65] Coski wrote concerning "the flag wars of the late twentieth century":

No writer did more to establish the Lost Cause than Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864–1946), a Southern lecturer, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and Baptist minister. [ citation needed] The South obviously didn't want a war with the North. So the question has to be, why did Washington DC create the war? a b Sheehan-Dean, Aaron, ed. (2014). A Companion to the U.S. Civil War. Wiley. p.837. ISBN 978-1-118-80295-3. Archived from the original on April 20, 2017 . Retrieved April 19, 2017.The Birth of a Nation' Shown". Washington Evening Star. February 20, 1915. p.12. Archived from the original on April 17, 2019 . Retrieved May 6, 2019.

To the old Union they had said that the Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state. To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery. Of all the many testimonials to the fact that slavery, and not states' rights, really lay at the heart of their movement, this was the most eloquent of all. [142] Gaines M. Foster (1987). Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913. Oxford UP. p. 63. ISBN 978-0-19-987870-3.

Fernandez, Manny; Hauser, Christine (October 5, 2015). "Texas Mother Teaches Textbook Company a Lesson on Accuracy". The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 21, 2021 . Retrieved January 3, 2019. Providing a sense of relief to white Southerners who feared being dishonored by defeat, the Lost Cause was largely accepted in the years following the war by white Americans who found it to be a useful tool in reconciling North and South. [42]