The “Lost Cause” Is A Lie To Pretend Southerners’ Ancestors Weren’t Racist Fucks
The South’s “Lost Cause,” despite its claims of defending “states’ rights,” is an ahistorical mask of propaganda devoid of the slightest understanding of American history between 1820 and 1865.
The South’s real cause in the Civil War was to preserve slavery and defend the racist idea that it was acceptable and morally justified to make money owning black people.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820, which brought in Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, was the beginning. Each further admission of new states into the Union exacerbated the always swimming Constitutional crises over issues of nullification, secession, and even civil war unless the Senate’s equilibrium between North and South was maintained.
Abraham Lincoln’s election at the top of a new Republican Party founded in part on abolitionist sentiments was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, and the Confederate insurrection was launched prior to Lincoln even arriving at the White House. For three decades, all of American politics had become consumed by the issue of slavery, and the smaller sideshow issues — such as tariffs and interstate enforcement of other states’ laws like the the Fugitive Slave Act — revolved around the fact that the Southern economy was inextricably tied to slavery.
South Carolina’s declaration of secession directly cited slavery, articulating opposition to Northern policies on citizenship and voting rights for Black individuals. The very first sentence insists that no longer will South Carolina “show deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding states” by remaining in the Union. Later on it complains that Northern states are “elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.” They were worried for their safety because they had a huge population of people they were violently enslaving.
Then, as if South Carolinians were concerned their political beliefs might one day be viewed ambiguously, the secession declaration references either slaves or the institution of slavery seventeen more times, and repeatedly criticizes Northern states for not abiding by the Fugitive Slave Act. They were arguing states’ rights all right… states’ rights to have slaves.
It wasn’t just South Carolina. The second paragraph in Mississippi’s declaration of secession states, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.” It makes you want to grab the next person you meet who says the Civil War wasn’t about slavery and shake their shoulders vigorously for being so wrong.
Don’t just take Confederates’ words for what they did, consider the antebellum culture they developed saturated with the aesthetic of slavery. Some in the South today are nostalgic for antebellum plantation belle culture, but such absurd elitist prosperity and lifestyles were financed by torturing slaves in various ways to grow and pick cash crops. By the late 1850s, much of the South’s income and wealth was directly tied up in buying and selling slaves for exporting cotton and tobacco.
Ironically, these crops were wrecking the southern soil and diminishing yields over time, thus further necessitating dependence on slavery by forcing the richest plantations to acquire new land and slaves to make up the difference on margin. Slave owners depended on expansion of slavery into the Western territories to maintain demand for the slave market, and allow poorer Southern farmers to move West to set up their own plantations on cheaper land.
This reality was described by an Alabamanian statesman named Clement Clairborne Clay, who served in both the US Senate and the Confederate Senate:
“I can show you, with sorrow, in the older portions of Alabama, and in my native county of Madison, the sad memorials of the artless and exhausting culture of cotton. Our small planters, after taking the cream off their lands, unable to restore them by rest, manures, or otherwise, are going further West and South, in search of other virgin lands, which they may and will despoil and impoverish in like manner. Our wealthier planters, with greater means and no more skill, are buying out their poorer neighbors, extending their plantations, and adding to their slave force. The wealthy few, who are able to live on smaller profits, and to give their blasted fields some rest, are thus pushing off the many who are merely independent.”
Clay was also racist, and, while joining in on Alabama’s secession, he said this about the North’s abhorrence of slavery: “No sentiment is more insulting or more hostile to our domestic tranquility, to our social order, and to our social existence, than is contained in the declaration that our negroes are entitled to liberty and equality with the white man.”
Quite literally for the Southern elites, the end of slavery and even just limiting its expansion meant the degradation and eventual end of their wealth, high status, and lavish lifestyles that had kept them comfortably removed from labor for generations. And no Southerner would be unaffected, as abolition would be the abolishment overnight of the South’s entire regional economy built and sustained by enslaved humans.
The end of slavery would also be the end of white Southerners’ self-respect. The South would have to admit to having a horribly tainted worldview of racial superiority that twisted the Bible and basic morality into legitimizing and praising cruelty. Slavery was also a comfort for poor Southerners because, no matter how far their lives descended into poverty and pity, they could feel good about white supremacy. Slavery was literally everything to the South.
Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, summed up this idea neatly with his “Cornerstone Speech,” in which he claimed that the Confederacy’s “foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.” To drive the point home, Stephens continued, “This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Following the war, Reconstruction, and the near-universal abolition of slavery everywhere else in the world, Southerners had to contend with the reality that they rebelled from the nation and fought against their fellow countrymen to preserve what was increasingly being remembered by the rest of the country as a national embarrassment and shame that would eventually go on to tarnish even the Founding Fathers themselves for their appeasement of the “peculiar institution” of slavery necessary to get the Southern colonies to adopt the Constitution. The original sin of America led to a civil war that killed about as many Americans as all the other wars in our history combined, and was inevitable because the South could not be dissuaded from owning people.
Gradually, novel political and economic rationales for waging the Civil War arose to disassociate the sacrifices of the Confederate army with the evil of slavery. A new, pseudo-historical ideology of the “Lost Cause” arose, which downplays and occasionally denies slavery’s role in secession and civil war.
At the turn of the 19th Century, various organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy were formed to honor the memories of their Confederate brothers, fathers, and grandfathers who had fought and died during the war, and rehabilitate the shameful Antebellum history with monuments and statues to the Confederate government and its soldiers.
Meanwhile, many Southerners refused to accept that blacks were equal with whites or that the rebellion and Confederacy were wrong, and for a century following the war Southern states developed a culture of terrorism around Black Codes, lynching, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, segregation, bus bombings, and other dramatic legal and illegal efforts to prevent blacks from exercising their rights to vote, own property, or even exist in public spaces. There are people alive today who violently yelled at a black boy drinking water from a “Whites Only” drinking fountain, and spit on a black girl walking into an integrated school.
This is why Confederate flags are stupid, and so is the sentiment that “the South will rise again.” The only way to take that is as a faux-ironic threat to re-enslave black people. Confederate pride and heritage is boastfully cornerstoned by slavery, and contemporary displays of the Stars & Bars romanticize the five miserable years white supremacists killed hundreds of thousands of Americans to keep their slaves. The Confederate flag is an inherently racist presentation whether Confederate aesthetes believe it or not.
Also, the Confederate flag often makes appearances alongside the Nazi flag, which says a lot about the values of people who still fly, wear, and display the Confederate Flag.
Thanks for your eyeballs!
—Dash MacIntyre
My prose poetry book, Cabaret No Stare, is available in print and on Kindle now. If you like the themes, attitude, and humor of my satirical work, you’ll like my poetry as well!
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