Lost Cause of the Confederacy

it's absolutely you

have to have a knowledge of the lost cause narrative to laugh your ass off at the

reversal

of the lost cause narrative in the industrial north in this film i don't think that's even an intellectual joke that's just funny no matter how much you know about history

i liked how political things tracked from the civil war forward like the republican and democrat parties were switched because early on that's what they were before they changed in the early 20th century.

I thought that was really interesting.

Valdosta to be exact,

I have to tell you, I think when people ask me what if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, I think they lost the battle, which was the war itself, but they won the war.

And Jeffrey Clark, Jeffrey Clark did not show up for his hearing today in federal court over-

'Cause he doesn't have pants.

Yeah, no pants, no pants to wear.

He doesn't have his court pants.

Yeah.

So we know, and we talk about this in the book, right? So we know that a lot of the history that we have lost or has been whitewashed, it wasn't kind of a, you know, a game of telephone where it was misinterpreted through the years, right? So we know that after the Civil War, when we were building schools, there was a group of women, white women, called the Daughters of the Confederacy, who was, who engaged in a campaign, who created the campaign to change history books.

It was called The Lost Cause.

And they were basically the, the authority through which all the history books, the textbook manufacturers and publishers had to go through to get their history books approved.

Yeah.

So who picked up on it is former Confederates that were trying to reclaim an old vision of the Constitution through a very targeted litigation strategy in, uh, culminating in the Supreme Court and also a kind of war of ideas, as one of them wrote in, in The Lost Cause that became a kind of tract that was putting forward the ideology that what we had was a, a reckless Congress because a- as the, as Reconstruction unfolds, Congress is passing the first civil rights laws, the first vote protections, the first agencies administering what they term practical freedom.

And so the, the ideology is, look, what we have is a reckless Congress.

It's, it's run amok.

So, so those become the, the politics of the nation as it is building multiracial democracy in the United States for the first time.

So just want to pick up on something you said.

You described how this was part of the Lost Cause movement, which of course is the movement to try to restore the former Confederacy to power.

And as part of that, there were efforts to depict the former Confederacy as fighting over a cause besides slavery, you know, and it oftentimes gets chalked up to federal overreach.

Once, Richmond was home to more Confederate statues than any other city in the US, which made it a hotbed for a pressing debate around how art commemorates American figures and which figures get to become heroes.

Confederate statues enshrine a particular narrative about how the Civil War should be remembered, like that it really wasn't about slavery and that the South only lost because the North had more resources, an idea often called the Lost Cause narrative.

And in recent decades, Confederate monuments have become symbols of an ongoing political battle over whose stories take the spotlight and what America does and should stand for.

But one artist is fighting statues with statues.

And I think that's really im- an important distinction.

Was it then a convenient target of the Lost Cause folks?

It's absolutely a convenient target of the Lost Cause, and like I said, right, Sherman goes to Atlanta in 1880, I think.

He's welcomed with open arms.

In 1881, Jefferson Davis publishes his Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, and he goes hard after Sherman, and that's where you start to see the kind of cultural tide turn a little bit towards Sherman as a villain, and Sherman's March as this great evil.

I do think that there are myths that are created for political advantage.

And I'm not so certain that anything that the South would say, I mean, if you want to say the Lost Cause is a myth, I mean, it's a false thing.

It's a lie, which it's not.

It's cogency in the two, which I've talked about in other places.

You've got people like Alan Nolan and David Blight and all these others.

Oh, sure it does.

It made it to where the United States, a lost cause myth came...

No, it wasn't that.

Then he blocked me.

Now, some people wanted me to go into his list and get into the Lost Cause stuff.

I'll talk about the Lost Cause in a minute.

but I can't see the image anymore, so I can't do that.

I didn't save it.

You can go and scroll to that section of the live stream or scrub over to that section of the live stream and you can get to it.

But he says something to the effect, well, I need to address this.

There's a lost cause professor out there who has a PhD who was putting me down because I don't.

But he was really driven by this firm principle, right? of devotion to the nation and devotion to human equality.

The book is Two Ships, Lincoln is Dead, The Lost Cause.

I'm John Batchelor.

This episode sponsored by Ridwell.

There's broken hearts everywhere.

It's 1866.

And a man named Edward D. Pollard publishes a book called The Lost Cause.

And now we seriously begin the poison that creates the myth of the Cavaliers and their righteous cause.