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This chapter cannot hope to be a complete biography of Wade Hampton's life, nor even of his postwar political career. It aims to show, however, that the biographical perspective is essential to a complete understanding of the nature and roots of Lost Cause mythology in the postwar South. It also argues that the roots of the Lost Cause can be found in the experiences of the war years. The Lost Cause legend was not simply a postbellum reaction to racial and social change, a deliberately dishonest means to reestablish white supremacy. For Wade Hampton, one of the major spokesmen of Lost Cause mythology in the late-19th century, the Lost Cause represented a persistent, deeply felt need to find validation and meaning in all that he had suffered and in all that his beloved had given for the Confederate cause. The experience of war and tragedy was so deeply engrained in Hampton's mind that it influenced his understanding of postwar political and social issues. It was not always the other way around. Historians remember Hampton as a soldier and politician, but rarely as a distraught father holding his dying son. Unless we remember that part of his life as well, we may never truly understand his postwar political assumptions or his motivations in espousing the Lost Cause.

This chapter traces the cinematic history of the heroic Lost Cause narrative created by ex-Confederates in the postwar years. It argues that after a long ascendancy established by The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939), the Lost Cause fell out of favor beginning in the mid-1960s—only to reappear in Gods and Generals, which was released shortly before Cold Mountain in 2003. Those two films revealed that competing memories of the Confederacy remained viable in a Hollywood that, just a few years earlier, seemingly had banished the Lost Cause.

This chapter discusses the renovation of Fort Sumter within the recentering of the Charleston economy on tourism. The shaping of the Fort Sumter National Monument was the single largest restoration project of mid-twentieth-century Charleston. While federal historical interpretation initially reinforced the landscape of Confederate memory built up in the city since the death of John C. Calhoun, intersectional partnership also heightened the vulnerability of the Lost Cause to a national ideological upheaval. The centennial anniversary of the first shots of the war exploded into a symbolically significant episode in the acceleration of the civil rights revolution. The ensuing transformation of Civil War memory would repudiate the Charleston Renaissance premises for the veneration of Fort Sumter.

This chapter examines the historical relic’s role in the memorial activities of the defeated South. It discusses the establishment at the turn of the twentieth century of museums that enshrined the ideology of the Lost Cause and the way those museums were structured around the metaphor of a collective memory cabinet whose objects could facilitate their viewers’ grief and mourning not only for the lives lost in the war but for the loss of the Confederacy’s military and political sovereignty. It further describes the ways that relics were deployed in public commemorations and rituals not only as a means of mourning white Southerners’ losses but as a means of reworking and transforming defeat’s legacy of shame and humiliation.

This chapter explores the use of the story of Noah's sons and related passages in the biblical exposition of Benjamin M. Palmer (1818–1902), a representative proslavery intellectual and leader in the southern Presbyterian Church from the 1850s until his death in 1902. Palmer was not only an influential advocate of slavery and secession but also an apostle of the South's Lost Cause following the Civil War. The role of Ham's curse is traced through Palmer's writings before, during, and after the Civil War, through which it is demonstrated that, with the demise of American slavery, Genesis 9–11 was utilized to justify racial segregation. The postbellum need for a new system of domination for dealing with the African majority in the South corresponds to a shift in Palmer's reading of Genesis from Ham the impudent son to Nimrod the rebellious tyrant who ignored the separation of peoples instituted by God following the flood.

This chapter examines Mississippi’s Lost Cause legend and argues that its creation stemmed from a desire to produce a positive identity in the eyes of the rest of the nation, and more importantly, to posterity. The Lost Cause legend housed in historical writings and memoirs proved to have a powerful influence in the social and cultural identity of the state, with its white residents embracing the legend well into the twenty-first century. In creating the Lost Cause legend, conservative Mississippians blamed Reconstruction and blacks for creating any negative image of the state. In addition to justifying secession and the Civil War, the Lost Cause legend argued for the merits and reasons behind a white supremacist social order and warnings of failing to heed such a course. In the process of losing their freedoms through the institution of segregation, black Mississippians created a conflicting dual identity as Americans and blacks who endured the worst of the American experience.

Devastated economically and psychologically by the war, the Clay family, like the South, desperately needed an anchor to provide emotional stability and a foundation for recovery. The South developed the Lost Cause with Robert E. Lee as the model of southern virtue and nobility. The Clays adopted many of the principles of the Lost Cause, but they created their own “marble man,” a new Henry Clay, as noble and virtuous as Lee but more national in his scope. The architects were primarily women, and that new image, a collective memory, guided the Clays into an uncertain future, providing an avenue for the return to the Union, a sense of family importance, and a curriculum for the education of each new generation.

This chapter recaps the effects of Mississippi’s Lost Cause legend through the beginnings of the twenty-first century. As blacks within the state chipped away at the white supremacist social order, they failed to break the cultural impact and influence of the Lost Cause legend still celebrated in the state. Conservative Mississippians persist in clinging to the Lost Cause legend, fighting vehemently against the Civil Rights movement and the end of segregation, as well as anything that puts their combined Confederate/American identity in jeopardy.

This chapter focuses on John Lafayette Girardeau, a Presbyterian leader who, after the Civil War, simultaneously worked to shape churchly reform and Lost Cause religiosity. Girardeau's postbellum ecclesiastical reform in ordaining African Americans and pushing for their ecclesiastical equality places him among emancipationists. However, his work on the battlefield as a Confederate chaplain, his aid to the public in coping with death and destruction after the Civil War, and his service as pastor of an integrated church places him in the reconciliationist camp. Meanwhile, his work as a defender of the Lost Cause, which helped justify the racial violence perpetuated by Lost Cause adherents, places him within the emerging norms of a white supremacist vision. Ultimately, Girardeau's life and world presents a much more complex picture than his missionary activity, representative Calvinism, efforts toward ecclesiastical reform, or Lost Cause ideology reveal.

Chapter 2, “ Ideology and Memory: The Continuing Battles,” focuses on the post-war history of ideology and memory. It examines how and why the ideological battles of civil war persist into later generations and how patterns of debate are affected by degrees of human determination or prejudices and by governmental structures or repression. For both countries it discusses honoring the dead, commemorations, ideology, and the role of institutions and generations. Dictatorial repression delayed debate in Spain, but eventually the generation of the nietos, or grandchildren, criticized “forgetting” or olvido in order to debate the issues of the war and open common graves, or fosas. In the United States northern indifference to racism allowed the South's Lost Cause ideology to triumph until the Civil Rights Movement. The chapter explains contrasting patterns of ideological influence in Spain and the United States.

The pro-Confederate Lost Cause memory of the Civil War continued to have considerable staying power during the 1930s, seen most notably in the popularity of the book and film versions of Gone With the Wind. At the same time, the Lost Cause was adapted to fit the sensibilities of this era. Many white Americans, for example, were drawn to the suffering of Civil War era white southerners in light of the economic trials of the 30s. Conservatives also doubled-down on the Lost Cause narrative as they pushed back against aspects of the New Deal agenda, as well as a reawakened civil rights movement and anti-lynching campaign. Finally, conservatives adapted the Lost Cause story to target Northern radicals and communists as the same kind of agitators who punished white southerners during Reconstruction. Black activists and communists tried to expose the racist and unpatriotic underpinnings of the Lost Cause but often fell short.

This chapter explores how white male associations defined a new postwar identity for Natchez men, many of whom established local Lost Cause traditions. Freemasonry grew rapidly in the late antebellum era, with Mississippi showing the highest per capita rate of membership in the nation. Large numbers of white mostly middle-class men in search of a place to bond with other defeated Confederate warriors joined numerous Masonic orders and began forging new identities for themselves. The militia tradition in Natchez with its emphasis on competitive sports was another means of defining white manhood after the war. The Adams Light Infantry offered members a venue to bond with other men, while also initiating the white community’s first attempts to create a collective memory of the war. In their efforts to dominate public space and create memorial traditions, Natchez militia members also resorted to violent attacks against blacks they perceived as challenging white supremacy.

This chapter examines Eudora Welty’s rejection of the Cult of the Lost Cause and its veneration of the Civil War, a conflict she associated with the kind of narcissistic melancholia Judith Butler interrogates in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Grief, Butler argues, can call one’s sense of self into question by providing potent reminders of the self’s dependence upon others and by unraveling the narratives that one begins to tell of oneself. Welty’s lone Civil War story “The Burning,” which closely parodies Gone with the Wind, juxtaposes the self-destructive grief of her southern white ladies who face rape and the destruction of their home with the illuminating mourning borne by their slave Delilah, who grieves for her own losses and for those of her masters, and in doing so signals a liberating break from the past and the possibilities of new identities and new stories.

This chapter explores the important role played by the jeremiad in antebellum and Civil War America. It begins with the national day of fasting proclaimed by President James Buchanan in January 1861. Nineteenth‐century Jeremiahs lamented their society's moral state, looked to the example of the nation's founders, and called their fellow Americans to reform. Surrounding these narratives of decline were deeply‐rooted ideas of American chosenness, often fostered by varieties of millennialism that saw the United States as integral to the accomplishment of God's purposes in history. The chapter also explores two rival narratives to the mainstream American jeremiad during these years: an African‐American jeremiad that called down God's justice on white oppressors, and the Southern “Lost Cause” narrative, which viewed the South as a quintessential Christian civilization and lamented its defeat as a sign of God's disapproval of Southern immorality. The chapter concludes with an examination of Abraham Lincoln's unconventional employment of the jeremiad tradition.

This chapter outlines how social identity is formed by groups as a means to create a positive social construct of themselves. Mississippians, white and black, during the sectional conflict, Civil War, and Reconstruction, fashioned new social identities as external events fractured and threatened the status quo. The resultant group identity culminated in a white social identity encapsulated in the Lost Cause that celebrated their American and Confederate heritage.

This chapter argues that the Irish part in the southern war effort has probably been exaggerated. However, there is little question that the Irish insinuated themselves into the civic religion of the Lost Cause, thus helping to frame how the regional past would be remembered.

This chapter discusses the implications of Abraham Lincoln's death to the Reconstruction era. He was not able to fulfill his own reconstruction plan while he lived, as it was evident in his last public address that he was appealing for the Louisiana plan. The public reception to Andrew Johnson's succession to the presidency. This chapter also discusses the Negro suffrage and the effect of Lincoln's death to the right of the Negroes, the effect of his assassination to the Lost Cause, the issues surrounding Lincoln's burial and memorial, and also the book published by Lizzy Keckley, Mrs. Lincoln's friend, about life inside the White House. The chapter also discusses the biographies written by some authors including Joseph H. Barrett, Josiah Holland and William H. Herndon.