The reason the South fought the has been contested ever since the surrendered in 1865. An odd turn of events, considering that when 11 Southern states from the Union at the war鈥檚 outset, they were very clear about why they were doing it.
In after , Confederate states explicitly said that they had seceded in order to preserve slavery.
South Carolina, the first to secede, cited 鈥渁n increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery鈥 in . Mississippi鈥檚 argued 鈥淭here was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union.鈥
It was only after the war that many former Confederates changed course, creating an alternative narrative that historians refer to as the 鈥淟ost Cause.鈥
鈥淚t began right at the end of the Civil War as Southerners tried to explain their own defeat to themselves,鈥 says David W. Blight, an American history professor at Yale and author of . Writers, journalists, and former soldiers began 鈥渢o fashion this series of ideas, one of which was their belief that they were never truly defeated on the battlefield; that they were only overwhelmed.鈥
They also argued, in direct contradiction to their secession statements, that the war was never about slavery.
Lost Causers argued 鈥渢hey had only fought for state sovereignty, states鈥 rights, national independence,鈥 Blight says. 鈥淭hey also fashioned a set of ideas and arguments that they were fighting to hold back the massive industrialization of America, they were trying to preserve rural agrarian civilization.鈥
In addition, they gave the cause a hero. When died five years after the war ended, many of his former officers 鈥渃reated a kind of a Lee legend and a Lee cult,鈥 he says. It promoted the 鈥渋dea that Robert E. Lee was the ultimate Christian soldier,鈥 who fought to preserve his home state rather than the institution of slavery鈥.
鈥淢ake no mistake, Lee fought for the Confederacy, and he knew that the Confederacy existed to preserve slavery鈥攖here is no question about that,鈥 Blight says.
To further bolster their hero, the Lost Causers also gave Lee a villain: Former Confederate General , who was already a for joining the northern Republican party and to defend New Orleans against the militant White League during . According to this new hero-villain narrative, Lee had lost the because Longstreet betrayed him. (Blight says this 鈥渄oes not hold up historically鈥).
Over time, the narrative morphed as more people鈥攊ncluding former President of the Confederate States of America 鈥攚rote about and memorialized the war.
鈥淏y the 1890s, the Lost Cause arguments had become really a racial ideology, they had become a set of arguments for white supremacy,鈥 he says. The idea that slavery had been a gentle institution that benefitted both masters and slaves, and that freedmen could not handle their emancipation, was a foundation upon which laws were built.
And as the South began to beat back Reconstruction policies with these Jim Crow laws, the narrative actually stopped being about loss.
It became 鈥渁 victory narrative,鈥 Blight says. 鈥淎nd the victory they鈥檙e telling is the victory over Reconstruction: That they had defeated the North鈥檚 effort to reconstruct the South, that they had defeated black rights and black suffrage.鈥
Confederate veterans and Southern organizations worked to make sure that school textbooks portrayed the Confederacy鈥檚 goal as righteous and Lee as a noble hero, effectively changing the way that the war and its causes were understood. This strategy worked so well that it influences education today. In recent years, Texas has that incorrectly teach students that slavery was not a major cause of the war.
鈥淚t鈥檚 endlessly necessary in this country to keep explaining the Civil War,鈥 Blight says. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a great distance between public memory and the scholarly history that historians write. And we just have to keep trying to make that distance shorter.鈥
