Lost Cause of the Confederacy

The Lost Cause of the Confederacy (or simply the Lost Cause) is an American pseudohistorical^[1][2] and historical negationist myth^[3][4][5] that claims the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery.^[6][7] First enunciated in 1866, it has continued to influence racism, gender roles, and religious attitudes in the Southern United States into the 21st century.^[8][9] Historians have dismantled many parts of the Lost Cause mythos.

Beyond forced unpaid labor and denial of freedom to leave the slaveholder, the treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments such as whippings. Slaves' families were often split up by the sale of one or more family members; when such events occurred, the family members in question usually never saw or heard from one another again.^[10] Lost Cause proponents ignore these realities, presenting slavery as a positive good and denying that alleviation of the conditions of slavery was the central cause of the American Civil War.^[11] Instead, Lost Cause proponents frame the war as a defense of states' rights and of the Southern agrarian economy against supposed Northern aggression.^[12][13][14] Lost Cause proponents attribute the Union victory to greater numbers and greater industrial wealth, while they portray the Confederate side of the conflict as being more righteous and having greater military skill.^[11] Modern historians overwhelmingly disagree with these characterizations, noting that the central cause of the war was slavery.^[15][16][17]

The Lost Cause reached a high level of popularity at the turn of the 20th century, when proponents memorialized Confederate veterans who were dying off. It reached a high level of popularity again 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 that Southern whites would know what they called the "true" narrative of the Civil War, and would therefore continue to support white supremacist policies such as Jim Crow laws.^[8][18] White supremacy is a central feature of the Lost Cause narrative.^[18]