Pulpits of the Lost Cause: The Faith and Politics of Former Confederate Chaplains during Reconstruction

By Steve Longenecker

A comparison of the faith and politics of former Confederate chaplains with intriguing insights about the evolution of their postwar beliefs and the Lost Cause
 
Pulpits of the Lost Cause: The Faith and Politics of Former Confederate Chaplains during Reconstruction is the first in-depth study of former chaplains that juxtaposes their religion and politics, thereby revealing important insights about the Lost Cause movement. Steve Longenecker demonstrates that while some former chaplains vigorously defended the Lost Cause and were predictably conservative in the pulpit, embracing orthodoxy and resisting religious innovation, others were unexpectedly progressive and advocated on behalf of evolution, theological liberalism, and modern biblical criticism.

Former Confederate chaplains embodied both the distinctive white, Southern, regional identity and the variation within it. Most were theologically conservative and Lost Cause racists. But as with the larger South, variation abounded. The Lost Cause, which Longenecker interprets as a broad popular movement with numerous versions, meant different things to different chaplains. It ranged from diehard-ism to tempered sectional forgiveness to full reconciliation to a harmless once-a-year Decoration Day ritual.

This volume probes the careers of ten former chaplains, including their childhoods, wartime experiences, Lost Cause personas, and theologies, making use of manuscripts and published sermons as well as newspapers, diaries, memoirs, denominational periodicals, letters, and the books they themselves produced. In theology, many former chaplains were predictably conservative, while others were unexpectedly broad-minded and advocated evolution, theological liberalism, and modern Biblical criticism. One former chaplain became a social-climbing Harvard progressive. Another wrote innovative, liberal theology read by European scholars. Yet another espoused racial equality, at least in theory if not full practice. Additionally, former chaplains often exhibited the fundamental human trait of compartmentalization, most notably by extolling the past as they celebrated the Lost Cause while simultaneously looking to the future as religious progressives or New South boosters. The stereotypical preacher of the Lost Cause—a gray-clad Bible thumper—existed sufficiently to create the image but hardly enough to be universally accurate.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9780817394370

Book preview

Pulpits of the Lost Cause

RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Series Editors

John M. Giggie

Charles A. Israel

Editorial Advisory Board

Catherine A. Brekus

Paul Harvey

Sylvester A. Johnson

Joel W. Martin

Ronald L. Numbers

Beth Schweiger

Grant Wacker

Judith Weisenfeld

Pulpits of the Lost Cause

THE FAITH AND POLITICS OF FORMER CONFEDERATE CHAPLAINS DURING RECONSTRUCTION

STEVE LONGENECKER

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Adobe Caslon Pro

Cover design: Lori Lynch

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2149-9

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9437-0

For Ethan, Greta, Nathaniel, Samuel, and Timothy

My grandchildren

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Weeping, Sad and Lonely: Chaplains during the Civil War

2. How Firm a Foundation: L. C. Vass

3. Nearer, My God, to Thee: John L. Girardeau, Moses Drury Hoge, and George Gilman Smith

4. Rescue the Perishing: Atticus G. Haygood

5. University Hymn: Charles Todd Quintard and William Porcher DuBose

6. Begone, Unbelief: John A. Broadus and Crawford H. Toy

7. Onward, Christian Soldiers: Randolph H. McKim

Conclusion: Tenting on the Old Camp Ground

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1. L. C. Vass

2. Monument in New Bern

3. George Gilman Smith

4. Moses Drury Hodge

5. John L. Girardeau

6. Fifty thousand people in Richmond to dedicate a statue of Stonewall Jackson

7. Cascarets: both laxatives and candy

8. Atticus G. Haygood

9. Charles Todd Quintard

10. William Porcher DuBose

11. Crawford Toy

12. John A. Broadus

13. Randolph H. McKim

14. Monument atop Culp’s Hill

Acknowledgments

The acknowledgments are often the last part of a book composed, but because of their importance, maybe they should be the first. As with all authors, my work would not be possible without the support of others, and I am indebted to many for innumerable courtesies and assistance. Matthew Reynolds of the University Archives and Special Collections, Jessie Ball DuPont Library, Sewanee: The University of the South, opened his facility for me in the summer, when it was normally closed. Thank you to Debra Madera, Pitts Theological Library, Emory University; Paula Skreslet, William Smith Morton Library, Union Presbyterian Seminary, Richmond; and Adam Winters, Archives and Special Collections, James P. Boyce Centennial Library, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Helen Semones and Vickie Montigaud-Green of the John Kenny Forrer Learning Commons, Bridgewater College, assisted with internet access to articles and documents and performed heroic feats of interlibrary loan. Grace Episcopal Church, Lexington, Virginia; Holy Trinity Church Inwood, New York City (Jake Dell); and the Church of the Epiphany, Washington, DC, made their church books available. The First Baptist Church of Ashland, Virginia, sent materials, and the Second Presbyterian Church, Richmond, Virginia (Alex W. Evans, Dorothy DeJong, and Rob Fergusson), provided images. Elizabeth Vass Wilkerson was gracious beyond description. I am also grateful to the staffs of the Alderman Library, University of Virginia; Carrier Library, James Madison University; Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries; Leyburn Library, Special Collections and Archives, Washington and Lee; South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina; Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library, Woodruff Library, Emory University (Rachel Detzler); and the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jake Dell, Monte Harrell Hampton, Gerald L. Smith, and the Southeastern Colloquium for American Religious Studies, especially Mary Henold, Mary Beth Mathews, Bob Pritchard, and Mike Utzinger, have critiqued portions of the manuscript. Jennifer Graber gave insightful comments to a conference paper that began this project. Martin Kalb, Yuka Kishida, Anne Marsh, Brandon Marsh, Carol Scheppard, and Larry Taylor answered questions large and small and otherwise provided much appreciated support. Annual faculty research grants and a sabbatical leave awarded by Bridgewater College were indispensable. The University of Alabama Press has been highly professional throughout the process, and I am deeply indebted to editor Daniel Waterman, the blind reviewers, and the entire staff for improving the manuscript in countless ways. I will never be able to repay everybody on this lengthy list, and, instead, I hope to return their favors by helping others.

Finally, I wish to salute Ada, my wife, for her long-suffering patience with my heavy teaching load during the academic year and my writing in the summer. Her unquestioning support and love over these years has been a joy. She is the ideal academic spouse.

The dedication is to my grandchildren. May their generation experience less of the rancor, violence, and raw injustice that underlie this book.

Introduction

Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson was purer because of his faith. So proclaimed Moses Drury Hoge at the dedication of a Jackson statue on October 26, 1875, in Richmond, Virginia. This was the first large ceremony for a Confederate monument, and a crowd of almost fifty thousand gathered for a massive parade and the unveiling. Hoge, a former Confederate chaplain and longtime pastor of Second Presbyterian in Richmond, delivered the main oration. He praised Jackson for assorted qualities sacred and secular, but midway through the lengthy speech the popular Presbyterian cleric mentioned Jackson’s purity, thrice.¹

Hoge was a Calvinist, and yet he managed to find purity in Jackson. He explained that Jackson was purer because he was penitent. In other words, because Jackson recognized his sinfulness, the great general sinned less, enough that Hoge could suggest purity. But Calvinists do not normally consider even partial purity as within the capacity of sin-soaked humans. Rather, for Calvinists humans tend toward depravity, and customarily Hoge considered purity incompatible with human behavior. Jackson, however, was different, and for the great Lost Cause Reverend Hoge bent his faith to serve his politics.²

This book is about former Confederate chaplains like Hoge, their faith, and their romanticized memory of the Confederacy, the Lost Cause. The germ for this book came with the realization that Calvinist Hoge had unabashedly and very publicly repudiated a core principle of his faith by getting close to saying that Stonewall Jackson was free of sin. How could an intelligent and devoted minister do this? Surely there must be more to Hoge and to other former chaplains.

Indeed, there is. True, the image of former Confederate chaplains as leaders in Lost Cause advocacy contains some truth. Like Hoge at Richmond, many participated in monument dedications and served as spokespeople for the larger Lost Cause movement. Moreover, almost all accepted the Lost Cause as a means to assuage the pain of overwhelming military defeat and to assail the alleged injustice of Reconstruction. Yet some were less involved. Although no former chaplains repudiated the Lost Cause, some were conspicuously quiet or reserved about it, reducing the movement to an annual ritual on Decoration Day. Others gave the Lost Cause mixed reviews by celebrating the old Confederate past only when it did not impede a modern future, a New South, or by honoring only part of the Lost Cause, perhaps individual heroes, while soft-pedaling Confederate values. This range regarding the South’s recent past was typically white Southern, making former chaplains a case study in the varied role of the Lost Cause in Southern society.

Former chaplains also exuded religious diversity. Most radiated the conservatism suggested by a champion of the Confederate past; they preached conservative religion that matched the conservatism of the Confederate movement. (Conservative: a look to the past for wisdom; confidence in traditional institutions and the status quo; and in Reconstruction-era context opposed to specific social reforms and to scholarly interpretation of the Bible.) Other chaplains, however, were conservatives when in Confederate gray but progressives in clerical black. In what must surely be a surprise, some embraced liberal religion. They held one perspective regarding the Lost Cause and another in a different part of their lives. In this, they exhibit fervency over intellectually inconsistent positions, a common human trait.

Confederate military chaplains were prominent during the Civil War but even more conspicuous afterward. Many belonged to historian Peter Carmichael’s last generation: the last born into slavery times, bonded economically and socially to the enslaver class, and coming of age politically amid the enflamed 1850s.³ During the Civil War, they marched, preached, assisted the wounded, and occasionally came under fire. A few were wounded or captured. Most served for only a portion of the war because the physical demands were so arduous. After surrender, former chaplains were heroes of the Lost Cause who enjoyed a significant voice in Southern society, and their chaplaincy became a career path as many became professors, college presidents, bishops, and newspaper editors. Historian Charles Reagan Wilson anointed them the main celebrants of the Lost Cause for their leadership in the movement.⁴

This book, the first comprehensive study of former chaplains during Reconstruction, makes several points. One is a narrow question about the role of former Confederate chaplains, ministers of the Lost Cause, during this period. Does the image of a middle-aged cleric praying before a new monument, proclaiming Jackson’s purity, or publishing esoteric treatises to rationalize military defeat capture their essence? This study discovers that many former Confederate chaplains defied this likeness, and a fuller picture of this important Reconstruction niche reveals multiple layers. Moses Drury Hoge illustrates merely one of the possibilities. Although the contradiction in his Jackson speech (a Calvinist proclaiming near-sinless-ness) suggests nuance or intellectual inconsistency, mostly Hoge was a stereotypical preacher of the Lost Cause whose politics and religion matched. In the pulpit, he hewed a conventional path, espousing Calvinism and traditional methods of biblical interpretation. Many former chaplains resembled Hoge, unswervingly conservative in politics and religion, die-hard Confederates, and white supremacists. This is not a surprise. Antebellum conservatives had resisted innovation in Southern religion, such as Catholicism, Spiritualism, Swedenborgianism, Unitarianism, and Universalism, condemning it as dangerous backsliding and Northern infidelity, and this trend continued into Reconstruction. Looking ahead, many former chaplains were just one generation away from twentieth-century fundamentalism. Moreover, the Confederacy was an undemocratic, patriarchal, landed gentry–dominated regime that was conservative, perhaps reactionary, to its core. Unadulterated conservatism in faith and politics is exactly what might be expected from former Confederate chaplains.⁵

Other chaplains, however, fit less cleanly into the conservative mold. One former chaplain became a social-climbing Harvard progressive. Another wrote innovative, liberal theology read by European scholars. Yet another espoused racial equality. On one level, then, this book sharpens the understanding of former Confederate chaplains by revealing that sometimes, but not always, their political and religious views diverged, as defenders of landed aristocracy and racial hierarchy promoted progressive religion.

As this book expands the image of former chaplains, it also stretches our understanding of the Lost Cause. Former chaplains demonstrate that the Lost Cause was a broad, popular, malleable ideology. As a group, they articulated the various Lost Cause options or interpretations. On the one hand, almost all former chaplains used the Lost Cause to explain and soothe the pain caused by secession and the lost war. Sometimes they sounded like proponents of civil or cultural religion, a role that marked continuity with their wartime tendency to blur church and state. (Civil religion refers to a nation, but the Confederacy was gone and instead maybe it was a cultural religion.) The Confederate past was sacred, and its artifacts, such as Dixie, the flag, and the old gray jacket, became religious symbols in rituals dramatizing the whole process. J. William Jones, for example, thoroughly mixed faith and the Lost Cause with a prayer of invocation to open veterans’ meetings: Oh! God our help in pages past, our hope for years to come, God of Israel, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—God of the centuries—God of our Fathers—God of Stonewall Jackson and Robert Lee and Jefferson Davis—Lord of Hosts—God of the whole of our common country—God of our Southland—our God! Jones slid seamlessly from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to Jackson, Lee, and Davis: all members of the same holy set.⁶ Additionally, almost all former chaplains attacked Reconstruction. Like most white Southerners, they embraced the Lost Cause for its ability to cast white Southerners as victims of Yankee perfidy. But some chaplains were otherwise curiously silent about the Confederate past, leaving us to wonder if they had philosophical objections to it, if painful wartime memories encouraged reticence, or if their thoughts simply disappeared from the historical record. Still others limited the Lost Cause to Decoration Day ritual. As they adorned graves, they looked to a New South future in which romanticized recollections of a past golden age were irrelevant. A few former chaplains were unforgiving diehards and reluctant Americans to their graves; for them, the Lost Cause served as a reminder of why the South fought and encouraged them to dig in. On the other hand, most former chaplains were reconciliationists and encouraged national forgiveness. For them, the Lost Cause sanitized the war’s memory of race and slavery, thereby enabling reunion with Northerners who likewise accepted this version of the past. In sum, the Lost Cause, embodied by its preachers, was like most large, popular movements in religion or politics: a house with many rooms.⁷

The Lost Cause house included all these rooms because of its size. The movement was so widespread that multiple uses were almost inevitable. Most broad, popular causes and crusades, whether civil rights, feminism, environmentalism, political parties, or religious organizations, to name a few, subdivide into factions or wings. The old joke that I’m not a member of an organized political party; I’m a Democrat, might be applied to any number of movements. It, therefore, comes as no surprise that the Lost Cause appeared in several editions.

Over this diversity reigned conservatism and white supremacy. Occasionally, more than we might think, a wayward soul wandered away from mainstream theology, but racial lines were harder to cross. For all their diversity over theology and the Lost Cause, former chaplains and the postwar white South shared white supremacy, and only rarely did a former chaplain move to the edges of racial norms.

Reconciling the ubiquity of white Southern racism and conservatism with the diversity of chaplains and the Lost Cause resembles the long-standing question about the balance between Southern homogeneity and heterogeneity. Scholars agree that the South was both a distinct culture with common characteristics and a region of considerable diversity, but they lean in different directions. William A. Link, for example, acknowledges the many Souths, but he emphasizes a shared regional identity based on unique historical forces. On the other hand, William W. Freehling easily refers to the South but calls attention to diversity. Early in his book The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854, he embarks on an imaginary journey to the numerous regional subcultures within the South, concluding that "whenever someone declaims on a South, premodern or egalitarian republican or whatever, ask them which South is meant and when?" Like Link’s South, former chaplains shared some similarities, especially racism and conservatism, but, like Freehling’s South, within this commonality lived surprising variation in political and religious thought. To borrow from Freehling, whenever someone proclaims about Confederate chaplains, be careful, and whenever someone pronounces on the Lost Cause, ask which Lost Cause they mean.⁸

This book also has thoughts about human nature. At its best, history not only produces interesting and insightful scholarship but also uncovers basic lessons about human behavior. In the case of former chaplains, the point is that individuals often simultaneously subscribe to conflicting perspectives. Specifically, even as some former chaplains looked to the past in celebrating the Lost Cause, a conservative impulse on behalf of a conservative movement, they concurrently espoused progressive and forward-looking economics or religion. If conservative Southern politics usually reinforced conservative religion, as suggested by historian Monte Harrell Hampton, the surprise is that it did not happen even more consistently.⁹ Some Lost Cause chaplains, for example, accepted Charles Darwin and evolution with its optimistic view of the future (i.e., that progress is the natural order) or they adopted theological modernism, also called higher criticism or liberalism (i.e., that each generation adapts the faith to fit its age and that modern scholarship, including archaeology, history, linguistics, and literary analysis, enhances understanding of the Bible and removes cultural baggage present when it was written). These former chaplains were conservative on Decoration Day and liberal on Sunday. One former chaplain particularly compartmentalized by embracing the Lost Cause in his public life outside the church but by abandoning some of its precepts as he served his congregation and his faith. Liberal-conservative blends and compartmentalization are probably not news—it’s dog bites man—but they illuminate a basic human characteristic.

Finally, this study of former Confederate chaplains reveals surprises and quirks that make humans so interesting. One chaplain hobnobbed with a former US president, and another consorted with a future president. One was a temperance man who died an alcoholic; he took medicinal alcohol. One had a parish on the northern tip of Manhattan Island and later a fashionable congregation just blocks from the White House. One became the victim of America’s first great heresy trial; among his accusers was his mentor, another former chaplain. In brief, many former Confederate chaplains led remarkable lives, full of surprises and twists, sometimes endearing, other times frustrating, usually fascinating.

Pulpits of the Lost Cause, then, aims to expand knowledge of former chaplains by juxtaposing their religion and politics and by portraying them as multifaceted, multilayered, sometime compartmentalizers who embraced a Lost Cause movement that had a variety of uses. Above all, they exhibit the quirks and surprises of human behavior.

The Lost Cause was born on April 10, 1865, one day after Robert E. Lee handed over his sword to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox, when Lee issued General Orders No. 9 to his defeated Army of Northern Virginia. The statement was read aloud to Confederate units: After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. Lee praised his soldiers but rationalized that a blue tidal wave had swamped them, conveniently forgetting extensive desertions near the end. From the humiliation, rubble, and death of the last days, the Confederacy’s memory of itself rose one day after its demise and steadily gained momentum.¹⁰

Organized Lost Cause activity appeared only one month later. In May 1865, two Winchester, Virginia, women were aghast that a farmer preparing for corn planting had plowed up two Confederate soldiers. They organized wartime female hospital workers to gather all Confederate bodies within a twelve-to-fifteen-mile radius of Winchester, rebury them in town, and then annually decorate the graves with evergreens and flowers. These Ladies of Winchester solicited financial assistance from communities across the South, claiming that the fallen had come from the entire region. The appeal worked. Within a year, the Winchester women had reinterred 2,489 bodies, 829 of them unknown.¹¹

Soon, seventy similar Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMAs) arose across the South, staging burial ceremonies under the glare of unsympathetic occupiers and serving as platforms of defiance. Historian Caroline Janney posits that women performed this early Lost Cause role because Union authorities considered them less threatening than men. At one display in May 1866, twenty-three military companies in Richmond, outfitted in Confederate uniforms but without Confederate States of America (CSA) buttons and insignia, as required by law, processed from Grace Church to Hollywood Cemetery, where they cleared weeds and marked graves. Stores closed, except for those owned by Republicans and African Americans, a testament to the broad white support for the event, but newspapers assured the public that it was unprovocative and merely the product of the ladies. The martial trappings suggested otherwise.¹²

The term Lost Cause appeared with similar alacrity. Almost as old as the events it remembered, the words may have been first used in 1866 with the publication of Edward A. Pollard’s book, The Lost Cause: The Standard Southern History of the War of the Confederates. Pollard’s volume, a 752-page history of the war and its causes, expressed an unabashed Southern version of the conflict. Pollard, a wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner, summoned recently defeated Confederates to renewed, albeit nonviolent, resistance. The war, he claimed, had only settled slavery and restored the Union, but nothing else had been decided, including racial equality, Black suffrage, and states’ rights. Just because the national government had won the secession argument did not mean that it enjoyed supremacy in other aspects, and the principles for which the South had fought remained alive. Furthermore, Pollard asserted that Southerners (a noble and cultivated people) should not surrender cultural and moral preeminence to the North and, especially, should not lose their superior soul to Yankee-like pursuit of material gain. The South had surrendered its army but not its values. One year after Appomattox, Pollard wrote that all is not lost.¹³

Just another year later, Robert Lewis Dabney, a Presbyterian seminary professor before the war, contributed another literary building block for the Lost Cause. Dabney, who had served Jackson’s staff as an officer and an unofficial chaplain, issued A Defence of Virginia [and through Her, of the South,] in Recent and Pending Contests against the Sectional Party. Dabney pronounced slavery as legal, benevolent, and biblical and declared that a race war, so often predicted by the South’s enemies, never happened because Southern interracial relations were so warm. He was unapologetic about the righteousness of Southern actions. Virginia, he claimed, seceded not over slavery but because the Federal government attempted to coerce a sovereign state. Now defeated, Virginia and the South suffered oppression at a historic level, but eventually the same heresies and chaos forced upon the South would bring ruin to the South’s oppressor and the cause would be avenged. Diehard-ism, the most stubborn, unrepentant, unforgiving version of the Lost Cause, emerged early.¹⁴

When in 1870 Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s greatest hero, died, the Lost Cause movement quickly changed. After the war, Lee had settled in Lexington, Virginia, a small town in the upper Shenandoah Valley, to assume the presidency of Washington College. A lifelong Episcopalian, he appeared in the local church book as Genl R. E. Lee.¹⁵ The old soldier lingered on the edges of the Lost Cause, walking a careful line between peace and reunion and unapologetic fidelity to the vanquished movement. Perhaps both sides of Lee’s split Lost Cause personality were accurate. Part of him still gripped the dead Confederacy, and a threat he made to renew hostilities is hard to explain away. But Lee also believed that publicly underplaying the defeated cause was effective strategy to restore the South within the national government. Moreover, he had blood on his hands. He had ordered tens of thousands to their deaths, and his avoidance of reunions and monument ceremonies and reluctance to recall the carnage might also be genuine. Perhaps Lee compartmentalized.¹⁶

During Lee’s tenure in Lexington, Lost Cause Confederates did not organize, except for the LMAs. He was the undisputed face of the Confederacy, and no one else could assume leadership of memory activities while he lived. Institutionally, the Lost Cause languished.¹⁷

But with the passing of the great general, the Lost Cause movement shifted into high gear. Coincidentally, Federal troops were gone, having departed when states reentered the Union, which in Virginia also occurred in 1870, and men assumed leadership of the movement, although women still played a large role.

Now the Lost Cause acquired institutional strength. Under the self-appointed leadership of Jubal Early, a former general and quintessential diehard, a veterans’ organization emerged in Virginia, and the Southern Historical Society moved to rent-free space in the state capitol building in Richmond. J. William Jones became the society’s paid secretary, and in 1876 it published a journal, the Southern Historical Society Papers. Thus, the Lost Cause had an infrastructure, although its institutional life can be overstated, as community memorial activities all over the South articulated Lost Cause sentiments.¹⁸

Likewise, by the early 1870s the thematic outlines of the Lost Cause evolved from its early iteration of Pollard and Dabney. As a broad, popular movement, the Lost Cause ranged widely, but its general outline was the following:

• Robert E. Lee possessed unparalleled military genius and all-around virtue. He was a great American patriot who sided with his native Virginia, largely by accident of birth.

• Slavery did not cause the sectional conflict or the war. Instead, the crisis resulted from a fundamental clash between agriculture and industry, cultural differences, or tariffs. Slaves were well-treated and contented, and white Southerners, if left alone, would have eventually given up enslavement voluntarily. Slavery, nevertheless, was a cherished right, and abolitionists were dangerous troublemakers who agitated something that little interested grassroots Americans.

• Secession was legal. Because the Constitution was a compact between sovereign states that does not prohibit secession—it is silent on the topic—withdrawal from the Union was lawful, and, therefore, the conflict was not a rebellion or revolution against the US government.

• Confederates were patriots who fought for the high-minded constitutional principles of liberty and freedom. A. D. Betts, a Methodist chaplain with the Thirtieth North Carolina, declared in his wartime diary that the conflict was about the unequalled and heroic struggle for the perpetuation of certain principles that underlie the purest and best form of government.¹⁹ John Levi Underwood, a Presbyterian chaplain to the 20th Alabama, maintained that instead of suffering defeat, Lee accomplished all that he fought for, and as proof Underwood pointed to the strength of states’ rights in the contemporary US government. Again, it was not about slavery but about lofty political ideals.²⁰

• Militarily, superior numbers overwhelmed the Confederacy. Surrender was inevitable because Southerners faced the vast population, wealth, and industry of the North. This axiom, however, had one exception: The South lost the war at Gettysburg, and it was all the fault of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, who allegedly dallied on the second day and cost Lee victory. As J. William Jones claimed, victory at Gettysburg and consequent Southern independence was possible "but for the failure of one man."²¹ Hence, Lee, the supreme military chieftain, was never defeated but was simply rolled by big numbers and/or undermined by subordinates.

• Southern culture was superior. Southern Cavaliers were typically gallant, chivalrous, and intelligent men of honor. The movie Gone with the Wind articulated this moonlight and magnolias version of Southern society as a land of Cavaliers and cotton fields.

• Southern soldiers were superior. They were heroic, law-abiding, and long-suffering. Through its effective resistance to the vast Northern juggernaut, the Confederate military demonstrated that it had the best fighters the world had ever seen.

• Confederates fought to defend homes and families. Politics had nothing to do with the war. Instead, aggressive Northerners foisted the war on peace-loving Southerners.

• Southern soldiers, both enlisted and officers, were exceptionally pious. Lee and Jackson were the highest examples of this. As early as 1868, a Southern publication described Lee as bathed in the white light that falls directly upon him from the smile of an approving and sustaining God, and later another admirer observed that the divinity in his bosom shown translucent through the man and his spirit rose up to the god-like. Moses Drury Hoge was not the only former chaplain to celebrate a Confederate general’s purity. J. William Jones referred to Lee’s stainless sword, and the University of Virginia faculty cited his stainless career and the complete harmonious perfections of his character and life. Jackson, likewise, was devout. In a 1997 biography, James I. Robertson Jr. crowned him a spiritual prince. Common soldiers, as well, were pious, best illustrated by the great revivals that swept the armies.²²

Of course, most of this is wrong. True, Lee and Jackson were devout, but whether a white light-bathed Lee or Jackson was a spiritual prince may be left to the faith perspective of individuals. The legality of secession has two sides; the facts indicate armed resistance to the US government, whether justified or not. Other components of the Lost Cause are even more problematic. True, Confederate soldiers fought hard and endured considerable privation, but this discounts the comparable commitment of Union soldiers and overlooks widespread desertions among Confederates near the end. Regarding overwhelming numbers, the Confederacy was indeed outnumbered but nevertheless had a reasonable chance to win and Confederate strategists knew it. Like George Washington during the American Revolution, they needed to keep their army in the field and outlast the adversary. If the North had superior resources, victory required mobilization of them, no small feat, and conquest and occupation of half a continent. The lost-it-all-at-Gettysburg claim ignores two more years of fighting. Regarding slavery’s role in the conflict, nearly all modern scholars agree that the South’s institution caused the conflict. Indeed, slavery threatened the American Republic from its birth. It divided the Constitutional Convention, and an antislavery petition roiled the first Congress. No less than Stonewall Jackson commented in early 1861 that the only difference between North and South was the North’s peculiar understanding of slavery and its determination to foment slave insurrection. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens exemplified the Confederate shift on slavery from the secession winter to the Lost Cause. In 1861, he remarked that slavery was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution, but just a few years after the war in a two-volume, 1,455-page pair of doorstops (1867 and 1870) he asserted that slavery was a minor issue unrelated to the war.²³ Serious evidence that the South would have ended slavery on its own does not exist. To the contrary, during the secession crisis many argued that long-term preservation of the South’s threatened institution required secession. The alleged superiority of a race-based slavery society merits no rebuttal, except to say that most enslaved people detested their condition and when the war gave them the opportunity to flee, thousands did. In the end, the Lost Cause, an idealized, distorted view of the past, was more myth than fact.²⁴

In the late nineteenth century, Lost Cause activity entered a new phase. As the war became more distant and as old soldiers aged, public recognition of the Confederacy became more frequent, less somber, and more celebratory. Many Southern communities planted markers, and veterans reunited, organized, and shook hands with former foes.

Organized Confederate veterans provided additional infrastructure to the Lost Cause movement. The United Confederate Veterans (UCV) was founded in 1889 and the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1895. The associations were popular, and by 1896 three-fourths of the counties in the former Confederate states had UCV camps. Additionally, veterans’ gatherings, which became festive with parades, bands, and rebel yells, were easier to pull off because occupation troops and Republican state governments were long gone and the economy was back. The young adults who had served in the army and their spouses now entered middle age with the financial resources and leisure time to support causes, including the one that famously lost.²⁵

Blue-Gray reunions gained momentum in the late nineteenth century and further stimulated the Lost Cause movement. At these hatchet-burying events, often moments of conspicuous reconciliation, old soldiers met on equal terms, thereby feeding the Lost Cause narrative that the conflict was between two foes of alike constitutional legitimacy. In turn, as described by historian David Blight, the Lost Cause abetted the reunion and reconciliation movement by sweeping the causes of the war under the rug. Blight summarizes the Lost Cause capacity to encourage reconciliation, especially at reunions, as everyone was right; no one was wrong. In other words, the righteousness of Confederate values equated to the virtue of the other side, a claim that