11
Had he been successful instead of the Hero of the Lost Cause he could not have been more beloved and honored.
—Mrs. Robert E. Lee, 1870
The combative Jubal Early was always especially sensitive to attacks—both real and imagined—on Robert E. Lee and the Confederate cause. In an address before the Southern Historical Society at White Sulphur Springs in 1873, he told his compatriots, “we cannot escape the ordeal of history. Before its bar we must appear, either as criminals—rebels and traitors seeking to throw off the authority of a legitimate government to which we were bound by the ties of allegiance—or as patriots defending our rights and vindicating the true principles of the government founded by our fathers.”1
Until then, the South’s enemies, as Early called them, had been presenting the former rebels as traitors—the government had literally indicted key leaders for treason and the press had accused them of various misdeeds, committed during the war. Using the word “indictment” in a symbolic sense, Early asked, “Shall we permit the indictment to go forth to the world and to posterity without a vindication of our motives and our conduct? Are we willing that our enemies shall be the historians of our cause and our struggle?” After a pause, he answered his own question, “No! a thousand times no!”2
The subject of history was of critical importance to the old Confederates of the Southern Historical Society. In the White Sulphur Springs address, Early urged his listeners to remain steadfast in the ongoing rhetorical wars:
The men who by their deeds caused so many of the battlefields of the South to blaze with a glory unsurpassed in the annals of the world, cannot be so recreant to the principles for which they fought, the traditions of the past, and the memory of their own comrades “dead upon the field of honor,” as to abandon the tribunal of history to those before whose immense numbers and physical power alone they were finally compelled to yield from mere exhaustion.3
Robert E. Lee was foremost among the men who had performed great deeds, and Jubal Early spent the remainder of his life defending and promoting the memory of the beloved Confederate general, in lecture halls and the leading journals of the day.
Early, who was described by a contemporary as “the fearless guardian of the fame of Lee,” and his fellow Lee admirers controlled the tremendously influential Southern Historical Society, an organization devoted to vindicating the truth about the Civil War.4 The society published the Southern Historical Society Papers, which included essential documents and debates on all of the central topics of the war.5 Lee in particular received exhaustive and hagio-graphical treatment in issue after issue. In 1877, for example, roughly 90 percent of the fifty articles published were about Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. By the early twentieth century, a leading academic journal said of the society’s papers, “no library, public or private, which pretends to historic fullness, can afford to be without these volumes.”6
Lee had already played an active role, both privately and publicly, in laying out his own defense during the last five years of his life. He had argued the war wasn’t about slavery, but rather states’ rights. He had also emphasized the relatively small size of his army in relation to the endless resources possessed by his opponents. Finally, he had insisted the South be restored to its proper place within the Union with the various southern states being allowed to run their affairs as they saw fit. Lee’s arguments would become central tenets in the Lost Cause tradition that was later advanced even further after his death by such former lieutenants as General Jubal Early and Colonels Walter Taylor, Charles Marshall, and Charles Venable.7
In the battle over the memory of both Lee and the Confederate cause, this group would achieve extraordinary success. Indeed, one modern historian believed they had been so successful that, “In the popular mind, the Lost Cause represents the national memory of the Civil War; it has been substituted for the history of the war.”8 Recent data provides support for this view. In 2011, a poll from the Pew Research Center found 48 percent of Americans believed states’ rights was the main cause of the Civil War compared with just 38 percent who felt slavery was the main cause. A McClatchy-Marist Poll from August 2015 reported that 41 percent of all Americans did not believe “slavery led the nation into civil war.” The Lost Cause outlook still has a powerful hold on the American memory.9
In one respect, the Lost Cause was an elaborate defense by former rebels against a broad indictment of their actions handed down by northerners soon after the war. In another sense, the Lost Cause tradition represented a longing for an idealized prewar South that was prosperous and governed by orderly relations between master and slave. The word “lost” therefore had two meanings. It referred to defeat on the battlefield and an antebellum culture that had disappeared forever. The fact that slavery was increasingly unpopular in the North, and much of the rest of the world, made it necessary to downplay the role of slavery as a factor in the war, even though it was central to the prewar society that was so highly valued. The Lost Cause tradition required a highly selective memory on the part of its adherents.
* * *
The journalist and Virginian Edward Pollard, who wrote for the Richmond Examiner during the war, was the first defender of the Confederacy to adopt the term “Lost Cause.”10 He developed the idea in two highly influential books: The Lost Cause (1866) and The Lost Cause Regained (1868). Pollard believed the actual word “slavery” was an odious term that had been used by northerners to further their own centralizing agenda. In reality, slavery in the South had been a mild system of servitude, according to Pollard, that “elevated the African, and was in the interest of human improvement.”11 Such a benign system made the southern slave “the most striking type in the world of cheerfulness and contentment.”
Pollard accepted that slavery had been defeated, though he also believed the South still possessed the upper hand in the ongoing war of ideas. For him, the war had decided many things, but it did not “decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide State rights.”12 His position—which is shockingly racist to modern Americans—was that the “South’s goal should be in the securing the supremacy of the white man,” while keeping the African American “in a condition where his political influence is as indifferent as when he was a slave.”13 Success in this goal, Pollard argued, would result in the “lost cause regained.” Ultimately, his extremely troubling worldview was dependent on viewing African Americans as inferior. It then followed, he posited, that “slavery was justified & denying African Americans political rights in the future is necessary.”
Jubal Early’s thinking on racial matters was quite similar to Pollard’s. In Early’s A Memoir of the Last Year of Independence in the Confederate States of America, published in 1867, he argued that slavery had been used during the war “as a catch word to arouse the passions of a fanatical mob.” Unfortunately for the South, the civilized world opposed its independence due to the slavery question. Early felt this was unfortunate, since he believed “the war was not made on our part for slavery.”
Like Pollard, Early saw slavery in the prewar South as beneficial, writing, “The condition of domestic slavery, as it existed in the South, had not only resulted in a great improvement in the moral and physical condition of the negro race, but had furnished a class of laborers as happy and contented as any in the world, if not more so.”14 He also argued that slavery had been the best way to manage the four million African Americans living in the South: “Reason, common sense, true humanity to the black, as well as the safety of the white race, required that the inferior race should be kept in a state of subordination.” Unlike Pollard, Early did not gracefully accept emancipation, believing the former slaves were now free to “starve, to die, and to relapse into barbarism.”
Pollard and Early, perhaps the two most important propagandists on behalf of the Lost Cause, believed slavery was a benevolent institution that uplifted African Americans, while creating vast wealth for the South and the rest of America. Lee expressed a similar, if less enthusiastic view, when he said—as we have seen previously—during the closing months of the war, “the relation of master and slave, controlled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and an enlightened public sentiment,” was probably the best that could exist between the white and black races. Ironically, despite the central role that slavery played in antebellum southern society, all three denied it was the primary factor in causing the war. Pollard and Lee would have agreed with Early, who said, “the struggle made by the people of the South was not for the institution of slavery, but for the inestimable right of self-government, against the domination of a fanatical faction at the North; and slavery was the mere occasion of the development of the antagonism between the two sections.”15
Such a view begins to resemble the proverbial Scholastic debates enjoyed by medieval theologians. Behind the intellectual contortions, believers in the Lost Cause looked back longingly at a world that had been dependent on chattel slavery, while also recognizing that slavery would never be accepted as a legitimate reason for having fought such a destructive, demoralizing war. So, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Lost Cause adherents chose to simply deny that slavery had been a cause of the war, a view that became, in the words of the historian Robert F. Durden, the “cardinal element of the Southern apologia.”16
The notion that the war wasn’t fought over slavery requires so many qualifications as to be an almost meaningless thing to believe. In his “Second Inaugural Address,” Lincoln was astute in describing the cause of the war:
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.17
Shortly before the war began, the Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens also made it clear for all time that the war was about slavery: “The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists among us. . . . Our 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.”18 An editor in Georgia in 1862 was even more succinct: “Negro slavery is the South, and the South is negro slavery.”19
Additionally, slavery was the central theme in the “Declaration of Causes” proclaimed by Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas after those states seceded.20 The authors of the Mississippi declaration wrote, “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.” Many more examples can be provided, of course, but that isn’t really necessary. As the historian Charles Dew has shown, “slavery and race were absolutely critical elements in the coming of the war.” Dew adds, “defenders of the Lost Cause need only read the speeches and letters of the secession commissioners to learn what was really driving the Deep South to the brink of war in 1860–61.”21
The proponents of the Lost Cause were more interested in success than accuracy. And their case would be much stronger if they focused on defending states’ rights and celebrating the greatness of Robert E. Lee. It made no sense at all to emphasize the role played by slavery in bringing about secession, especially after it had been abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment. Despite all of the various contradictions, the Lost Cause, with Lee as its supreme figurehead, was built upon a foundation of white supremacy. Lee himself embraced that idea, too, though he would have been uncomfortable being deified by the movement.
* * *
Glorifying the memory of Robert E. Lee proved to be a more straightforward task for his acolytes than denying slavery’s role in bringing on the war. Upon hearing the news of Lee’s death, Jubal Early remarked, “the loss is a public one, and there are millions of hearts now torn with anguish at the news that has been flashed over the wires to all corners of the civilized world.”22 Shortly after the funeral, Early addressed the veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia, noting in amazement that “such a man went down to his grave a disenfranchised citizen by the edict of his contemporaries—which infamous edict, the fiat of an inexorable despotism, has been forced to be recorded upon the statute book of his native State.”23 In truth, Lee was no longer disenfranchised at the time of his death, but Early was clearly outraged by the North’s apparent lack of respect for his chief. He urged his fellow soldiers to erect “an enduring monument to him that will be a standing protest, for all time to come, against the judgment pronounced against him.”
It would take a while, but Early eventually achieved his dream of erecting a monument to Lee in Richmond on May 29, 1890, twenty years after his death.24 On that beautiful spring day, beginning at 6:00 a.m. in the former Confederate capital, roughly 150,000 people gathered for the unveiling of the colossal monument that had been designed by the Frenchmen, Antonio Mercie. Among the honored guests were two of Lee’s daughters, Mildred and Mary, and two of his sons, Rooney and Robert Jr. Lee’s nephew Fitzhugh, who had recently been governor of Virginia, was the Chief Marshall of the ceremonies. Gen. Joseph Johnston and Jubal Early also played formal roles at the event.
The featured speaker for the dedication ceremony was Colonel Archer Anderson, an executive at Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond. He began his lengthy speech by acknowledging how remarkable it was that the South could now enthusiastically honor its military chief, twenty five years after Appomattox.25 Despite all of the bloodshed and bitterness, the South hadn’t been forced to “renounce any glorious memory.” Rather, it was “free to heap honors upon their trusted leaders, living or dead.” This was something that all Americans should be proud of, he felt.
Anderson’s remarks revealed that the Lee cult was in full flower in 1890. At one point, he gushed, “Lee was the purest and best man of action whose career history has recorded.” That was high praise indeed in a city that also had monuments to such founding fathers as George Washington and Chief Justice John Marshall. Anderson also declared that no one, even Lee’s critics, had ever “discovered one single deviation from the narrow path of rectitude and honor.” He even concluded his remarks stating that “it pleased Almighty God to bestow upon these Southern States a man so formed to reflect His attributes of power, majesty, and goodness!” Apparently God had given the South the perfect man, perhaps as a consolation for not granting it victory. It may seem odd that God would reward the South with one hand, while denying it triumph on the battlefield with the other. Regardless, the South had been truly blessed to have had Lee as its leader. Almost everyone in attendance would have agreed with Anderson on that point.
After the main speech, General Johnston pulled the cord that revealed the statue. The Richmond Dispatch described what happened next: “The men went wild. Veterans shouted and cried and hugged each other. . . . The women and children waved handkerchiefs, parasols, and fans. The artillery thundered; the musketry followed, volley upon volley.”26 Richmond officially had its Lee monument. Its total height was a mammoth sixty-one feet, two inches. Upon seeing the monument for the first time, a Confederate veteran remarked that he experienced “all the old-time emotions, and his heart told him, ‘That’s Marse Robert.’ ” The excitement of the day was so intense that one young boy climbed the Washington Monument in Richmond’s Capitol Square—a climb of seventy-five feet—and placed a Confederate flag in the “hands of the Father of his country.”
After the ceremony, a reporter for the New York Times said of Lee, “his memory is, therefore, a possession of the American people.” The Times reporter also noted that four or five “old colored men” were in attendance that day. At one point, Jubal Early said to a colleague, “I want to introduce you to two reputable colored gentlemen of Virginia—Benjamin and Pleasant Saunders—two of my old slaves.”27 Benjamin and Pleasant said to the man, according to the reporter, “We is Mars’ Jubal’s niggers. We is, and we done come over two hundred miles to pay our specs to him.” Jubal Early then added, “These are respectable darkies; none of your scalawag niggers.” One sees in this anecdote that Early longed for the social relations that existed before the war. The quoted material is also a commentary on the era—the Times seemed to give little thought to reporting the story in this way.
Evidence suggests that most of Richmond’s African American community opposed the Lee monument. Black members of Richmond’s city council voted against funds for both the Lee cornerstone ceremony in 1887 and the 1890 unveiling event.28 After witnessing the 1890 ceremony, John Mitchell Jr.—an African American editor for the black newspaper Richmond Planet —wrote, “This glorification of States Rights Doctrine—the right of secession and the honoring of men who represented that cause fosters in this Republic the spirit of Rebellion and will ultimately result in handing down to generations unborn a legacy of treason and blood.”29
Outside of the South, the response to the monument was mixed. Some mainstream newspapers like the New York Times and the New York Herald were mostly supportive. There was also considerable criticism, however, in various newspapers and public forums across the North and West. One withering critique was delivered by Republican Senator John Ingalls of Kansas, in a Memorial Day address at Gettysburg the day after the ceremony in Richmond.30
Even though it had been twenty years since the general’s death, Ingalls returned to some familiar criticisms. Lee had violated his oath to the Constitution and had committed treason. Ingalls was incredulous that Lee was being celebrated in Richmond on the day before Memorial Day, despite having committed these infamous crimes:
And yet, by a great object lesson in treason, in disloyalty, in perjury, in violation of faith, of public and private honor, upon the very day that has been for a quarter of a century almost made sacred by the common concurrence of the loyal and patriotic people of the Republic for the consecration of the graves of the Union dead, those who profess to have accepted the results of the war in good faith who profess that they had furled the flag of treason and rebellion forever, who profess that they came back under the Constitution and laws of the United States with honor and patriotism, choose this occasion of all other anniversaries in the 365 days in the year, with every augmentation of insolence which they should copy, a Confederate flag is placed in the hand—the bronze hand—of the statue of Washington!
Cries of shame apparently burst out from the audience after hearing about the Confederate flag being placed in Washington’s bronze hand. To many northerners, that appeared to be a particularly provocative act.
Throughout his speech, Ingalls expressed outrage at how successful the Lost Cause tradition had become in reframing how the war would be remembered. He was mystified that the South, twenty-five years after the end of the struggle, was apparently teaching its children that only God knew whether the North or the South was right. He responded angrily by recalling, “Millions of human beings were held in slavery, cruel, monstrous, inconceivable in its conditions of humiliation, dishonor and degradation; unending and unrequited toil, helpless ignorance, nameless and unspeakable, families separated at the auction-block and women and children tortured with the lash.” Despite this horror, eleven states tried to secede from the Union in order to make “this system of slavery the corner-stone of another social and political fabric.” Ingalls was adamant: one side was right and the other was wrong. As a result of the Union’s victory, it was now true that “the sun rises upon no master, and sets upon no slave.”
While Ingalls believed the North’s cause was morally superior, he also appreciated that southerners might want to memorialize their dead and pay out pensions to Confederate veterans. He even believed it was acceptable if they wanted to eulogize the Lost Cause “and carry the stars and bars if they prefer it to the star-bangled banner of the nation.” What Ingalls would not accept, however, was the assertion that “Lincoln and Davis, that Grant and Lee, that Logan and Jackson [were] equally entitled to the respect and the reverence of mankind and that God only knows exactly which was right.” Such beliefs, according to Ingalls, were “blasphemy,” deserving of “rebuke and condemnation.”
* * *
The editor John Mitchell was also struck by the moral ambiguity of the unveiling ceremony. In an editorial for his newspaper, he wrote, “The honoring of the Confederacy was indulged in while everyone in that joyous throng stood ready to declare to you that the South was right and the North was wrong. ‘Not beaten but overpowered,’ they would say.”31 Perplexed by the display of Confederate emblems, Mitchell wondered what all of this could possibly mean.
John Mitchell’s parents had been house slaves. After graduating from Richmond Normal and High School in 1881, Mitchell began his career as a teacher. Later, he became the editor of the Richmond Planet, a black weekly founded in 1883. Known as the “fighting editor,” he also served on the Richmond City Council from Jackson Ward, a mostly black neighborhood. In defending his council vote against funds for the Lee ceremony, he had said that those who bore the “clinking chains of slavery” should not be expected to vote for such an event.32
In his editorial, Mitchell wondered what Americans were teaching rising generations in the South by placing “Lee on equality with Washington.” He believed this devotion to the Lost Cause showed an improper appreciation of the Union. All of the South’s frequent displays on behalf of its former leaders had gone too far, according to Mitchell. It was doing the South no good, while actually causing “much harm.” In another observation in his newspaper, shortly after the Lee monument ceremony, Mitchell offered an African American perspective on Civil War memory: “The Negro was in the Northern processions on Decoration Day and in the Southern ones, if only to carry buckets of ice-water. He put up the Lee monument, and should the time come, will be there to take it down. He’s black and sometimes greasy, but who could do without the Negro.”33
Unfortunately for Mitchell and fellow African Americans, things would get much worse in the South before they would get better. The historian David Blight has noted that “the unveiling of the Lee monument came just before the final substantive national debate the country would have in the nineteenth century over the black man’s right to vote and the responsibilities of the government to protect that right.”34 Alas, over the next two decades, African Americans would become disenfranchised in each of the former Confederate states including Virginia. “High atop his monument in Richmond,” writes Blight, “Lee represented many of the inspirations Southerners now took from their heritage: a sense of pride and soldierly honor, an end to defeatism, and a new sense of racial mastery.”35
* * *
The renowned English historian George Macaulay Trevelyan once quipped that social history was “history with the politics left out.” Similarly, the hagiographic treatment of Lee in the decades after the war was southern history with the African American experience left out. Within this tradition, Lee’s role in upholding a social system based on chattel slavery was reframed as a noble defense of a Constitution he loved. Hardly mentioned at all was his reactionary opposition to the essential task of transforming freedmen into citizens after the war. Overall, the heroic Lee tradition portrayed him as an opponent of slavery before the war and a lead actor in bringing about sectional reconciliation afterward. The centrality of the idea of white supremacy to his actions and worldview were effectively erased from the historical record by his disciples. The beatified Lee required purity, unsullied by the fierce racial debates of his time. As a result of the Lost Cost mythmaking, however, posterity has “lost” a more accurate appraisal of the man.
The famous novelist Henry James noticed this absence of the African American experience when he visited Richmond in 1905 for a travel book he was writing. Upon arriving in the city, he felt it “had grown lurid, fuliginous, vividly tragic.”36 As he wandered around the town that had sent roughly 350,000 slaves downriver in the decades before the Civil War, he became conscious that something essential was missing. It was only after standing in front of the Lee monument lost in thought that he eventually figured out the riddle.
James admired the “equestrian statue of the Southern hero” and felt it was a monument of considerable artistic merit.37 The surrounding neighborhood, however, was desolate: “somehow empty in spite of being ugly, and yet expressive in spite of being empty.” It was only upon turning his back on the monument and the surrounding area that James was able to solve “the riddle of the historic poverty of Richmond.”38
For James, Richmond’s problem was that it had “worshipped false gods.” He then concluded, “As I looked back, before leaving it, at Lee’s stranded, bereft image, which time and fortune have so cheated of half the significance, and so, I think of half the dignity, of great memorials, I recognized something more than the melancholy of a lost cause. The whole infelicity speaks of a cause that could never have been gained.”39 Fighting to uphold a slave-based social system—a project described by James as “extravagant, fantastic, and today pathetic in its folly”—wasn’t just a lost cause, it was an unwinnable cause. Going further, one might say it was unwinnable because it was a bad cause that violated the essence of our founding principles. Only by restoring the black experience to the narrative does that become clear to all Americans.