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The Lost Cause of the Confederacy (or simply the Lost Cause) is an American pseudohistorical and historical negationist myth that claims the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery. First enunciated in 1866, it has continued to influence racism, gender roles, and religious attitudes in the Southern United States into the 21st century. 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. 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. Instead, Lost Cause proponents frame the war as a defense of states' rights and of the Southern agrarian economy against supposed Northern aggression. 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. Modern historians overwhelmingly disagree with these characterizations, noting that the central cause of the war was slavery. 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. White supremacy is a central feature of the Lost Cause narrative. Origins The Lost Cause's multiple origins include its main argument that slavery was not the primary cause, or not a cause at all, of the Civil War. Such a narrative denies or minimizes the explanatory statements and constitutions published by the seceding states, and the wartime writings and speeches of Confederate leaders such as CSA Vice President Alexander Stephens's Cornerstone Speech, instead favoring the leaders' more moderate postwar views. The Lost Cause argument stresses secession as a defense against a Northern threat to a Southern way of life, and says that the threat violated the states' rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. The Lost Cause's assertion that any state had the right to secede was strongly denied by the North. It portrays slavery as more benevolent than cruel. Confederate generals are characterized as saintly and Christ-like in Southern iconography, as deeply religious, and as flawless generals portrayed in Lost Cause monuments. They say that history is written by the victors, but the Civil War has been the rare exception. Perhaps the need for the country to stay together made it necessary for the North to sit silently and accept the South's conception of the conflict. In any case, for most of the past 150 years, the South's version of the war and Reconstruction has held sway in our schools, our literature and, since the dawn of feature films, our movies. The term "Lost Cause" first appeared in the title of an 1866 book by the Virginian author and journalist Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. He promoted many of the themes of the Lost Cause such as stating states' rights was the cause of the war and Southerners were forced to defend themselves against Northern aggression. He dismissed the role of slavery in starting the war and understated the cruelty of American slavery, even promoting it as a way of improving the lives of Africans. Pollard's revisionist history continues to have an effect on how slavery and the Civil War are taught in the United States. For example, in 1866 Pollard wrote: We shall not enter upon the discussion of the moral question of slavery. But we may suggest a doubt here whether that odious term "slavery", which has been so long imposed, by the exaggeration of Northern writers, upon the judgement and sympathies of the world, is properly applied to that system of servitude in the South, which was really the mildest in the world; which did not rest on acts of debasement and disenfranchisement, but elevated the African, and was in the interest of human improvement; and which, by the law of the land, protected the negro in life and limb, and in many personal rights, and, by the practice of the system, bestowed upon him a sum of individual indulgences, which made him altogether the most striking type in the world of cheerfulness and contentment. Pollard in The Lost Cause and its sequel The Lost Cause Regained drew inspiration from John Milton's Paradise Lost with the intention of portraying the pre-war South as a "paradise" that was lost in its defeat. African Americans oppose Lost Cause monuments Stories of happy slaves and benevolent slave owners became propaganda to defend slavery and to explain Southern slavery to Northerners. The United Daughters of the Confederacy had a Faithful Slave Memorial Committee and erected the Heyward Shepherd monument in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. In explaining Confederate defeat, an assertion is made that the main factor was not qualitative inferiority in leadership or fighting ability but the massive quantitative superiority of the Yankee industrial machine. At the peak of troop strength in 1863, Union soldiers outnumbered Confederate soldiers by over two to one, and the Union had three times the bank deposits of the Confederacy. After the Civil War, white Southerners wanted to portray the South positively by erecting Confederate monuments to memorialize Confederate generals in support of the false narrative that Confederates had fought the war to preserve states' rights and not slavery. African Americans such as 19th century civil rights activist Frederick Douglass opposed the erection of Confederate memorials. In 1870, Douglass wrote: "Monuments to the 'lost cause' will prove monuments of folly [...] in the memories of a wicked rebellion which they must necessarily perpetuate [...] It is a needless record of stupidity and wrong." On May 30, 1871, during the national celebration of Memorial Day at the tomb of the unknown soldier in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, Douglass delivered a speech abou.... Discover the Adam Spivey popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Adam Spivey books.