The Christ of Lost Cause mythology
I posted the following comment in response to Kevin Levin's post at his Civil War Memory blog, Peter Carmichael on Robert E. Lee or Why Robert K. Krick and Michael Fellman Will Never Agree 10/09/07:
Kevin, I'm not familiar with either Feldman's or Krick's work yet.
But Krick's polemics sound awfully familiar.
I keep William Faulkner's books in the section of my bookshelf reserved for Bibles and religious literature. Because I consider his work part of the Scriptural canon.
One of the distinctive things about Faulkner is the serious research he obviously did on the Civil War period. And the fact that he clearly wasn't blinded by Lost Cause mythology in his treatment of the period.
But I can't think of an instance where Faulkner "mocks" the Old South. He didn't make up phony romantic tales to justify the cause of slavery. But he took the characters who did support that cause as seriously as those who did not.
I'm also not sure who Carmichael had in mind when he criticized people for using the label "neo-Confederate" too freely. But it would be generous in the extreme to assume that the deliberate misrepresentations of history that were part of the Lost Cause ideology from roughly the moment Lee surrendered his sword to Grant are the result of some sincere but mistaken "Victorian" view of history. A distorting assumption about history is one thing. Making stuff up is something else.
It's one thing to analyze, say, whether the circumstantial evidence about Lee's decision to join the Confederate revolt was as agonized as he later claimed it was. I tend to think his claim to that effect was a load of bull, though it's something on which a realistic student of the subject could reasonably disagree.
But the ludicrous claim of the true believers in the Lost Cause that slavery had nothing to do with causing the Civil War is a whole different level of discourse. It may not be quite so extreme or contemptable as Holocaust denial. Since several generations of Southerners were raised on that version of history (including me), it's possible that someone could argue the "slavery had nothing to do with it" claim out of gullibility and lack of real familiarity with the history.
But whatever excuse it comes with, it's pseudohistory with as much claim to be taken seriously as other examples of that genre.
The Civil War was also a political event. Political views shouldn't effect how someone goes about estimating the number of dead at Antietam. But making judgments about the significance of events is also a part of writing and understanding history. I fail to see how anyone from any country who supports democracy could look at the Civil War and not recognize that the Union was the defender of democracy and the Confederacy was its enemy. Or fail to be deeply suspicious of any attempt to glorify or romanticize or justify the Confederate cause.
And as long as there are significant numbers of people who are determined to make Lee the Christ of the Lost Cause, historians will have to be aware that the Lost Cause fans will seek to tear anything they can out of context to justify their own ideological view of the Civil War. I once heard Christopher Browning discuss how David Irving's claim that Hitler did not order the Holocaust influenced real history-writing. Not, he said, because real historians took the claim seriously. But because Irving's false claim made historians take a closer look at the exact sequence of the decision-making in 1940-41 in that regard.
Historians of the Civil War for the foreseeable future will have to deal with Lost Cause claims about the glorious and honorable Confederacy (that nothing at all to do with slavery!) in much the same way.
Tags: american civil war, confederate heritage month 2008, lost cause, us civil war
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