Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten

How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War

Gary W. Gallagher

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780807886250
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la guerre de Sécession

More than 60, 000 books have been published on the Civil War. Most Americans, though, get their ideas about the war--why it was fought, what was won, what was lost--not from books but from movies, television, and other popular media. In an engaging and accessible survey, Gary W. Gallagher guides readers through the stories told in recent film and art, showing how these stories have both reflected and influenced the political, social, and racial currents of their times.

Chapter 1: A Contested Historical Landscape: The Civil War Generation Interprets the Conflict

Americans began their struggle to define the historical meaning of the Civil War as soon as four years of slaughter ended in the spring of 1865. Their quest frequently took the form of heated debates that continue despite the passage of nearly 150 years. Many of the debates carried out by the Civil War generation focused on details relating to military operations. Some pitted former Confederates against former Federals, as when partisans of Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee engaged in strident exchanges about manpower during the Virginia campaigns of 1864–65. Lee’s defenders sought to magnify Union strength and minimize their own. They portrayed Lee as a noble chieftain who struggled against hopeless odds and Grant as a graceless butcher who triumphed only because he could draw on almost limitless men and matériel. Grant’s partisans reacted predictably, also manipulating the numbers to insist that there had not been a huge difference in strength and claiming that Grant’s superior generalship had been the key to Union victory. Other debates witnessed former soldiers from the same side assaulting each other in print. Most notable of these was the no-holds-barred controversy among ex-Confederates over culpability for the defeat at Gettysburg—a long-lived affair that came to center on the actions of General James Longstreet. For their part, Union veterans argued about leadership among their commanders at Second Bull Run, Gettysburg, and elsewhere. Most of these debates—which filled the pages of magazines, memoirs, and regimental histories for several decades after the war—revealed far more about the literary combatants in the postwar years than about the wartime events their prose dissected.¹

Another set of debates shifted the spotlight to how the war’s broader meaning would be interpreted by subsequent generations. Many people North and South cared passionately about how history would judge their actions in a struggle that had sent more than 3 million men into military service (out of a population of about 31.5 million) and claimed more than 600,000 lives. Here the stakes were much higher than in literary jousting over such relatively minor points as whether Longstreet dragged his feet on the second day at Gettysburg. These larger debates brought the poisonous issue of slavery into the picture, both as a precipitant of secession and war and, in the form of emancipation, as a factor that altered the character of the conflict and helped define its aftermath. They raised questions about comparative sectional virtue, moral right, and even divine approbation.²

Thumbnail treatments of four major interpretive traditions will provide background for the examination of films and artworks. One of the four formed almost immediately after the war in the South and two others in the North. Among them, the three offered starkly contrasting versions of the Civil War era, and all have modern counterparts that echo their arguments. The fourth tradition appeared somewhat later, won numerous adherents throughout the nation by the end of the nineteenth century, and remains widely evident today.

“A Record of Achievement, Endurance, and Self-Sacrificing Devotion”

What came to be called the Lost Cause school of interpretation arose in the South and contained several elements that have proved to be remarkably tenacious. Former Confederates confronted the postwar world as a people thoroughly beaten on the battlefield but defiantly unapologetic about their attempt to establish a slaveholding republic. The conflict had killed one in four military-age white southern men (American fatalities in World War II would have been approximately 6.5 million, rather than 400,000, if the ratio of dead to total population in the United States had matched that of the Confederacy), left much of the region’s economy in ruin, wrought dramatic changes in the landscape, and, most important by far, destroyed the South’s slave-based social system. Ex-Confederates sought to take something positive away from their catastrophic experiment in nation-building. They embraced a public memory of the Civil War era that celebrated their antebellum civilization with little reference to slavery, justified secession on constitutional grounds, highlighted their undeniable wartime sacrifice, and insisted that defeat in the face of impossible odds entailed no loss of honor. Refined and repeated endlessly during the post-Appomattox decades, Lost Cause arguments reached a wide audience through participants’ memoirs, speeches at gatherings of veterans, and commemorative programs orchestrated by Ladies’ Memorial Associations at the graves of Confederate soldiers. Various artworks, including prints published in the North, also celebrated the Confederate struggle, as did a large number of public monuments.³

Architects of the Lost Cause hoped to provide their children and future generations of white southerners with what they called a “correct” narrative of the war (women were especially diligent in monitoring school textbooks). Some Lost Cause writers specifically sought to create a published record that would influence later historians.⁴ In terms of shaping how Americans have understood the Civil War, former Confederates succeeded to a remarkable degree. One need look no further than Robert E. Lee to find an obvious example of that success. Lee functioned as the preeminent Lost Cause hero. Ex-Confederates could focus on him and his famous victories without engaging the noxious issue of slavery or some of the messier political and social dimensions of the war. By the second or third decade of the twentieth century, Lee stood with Abraham Lincoln as one of the two most popular Civil War figures. In what must be reckoned a great irony of Civil War memory, Ulysses S. Grant, who did more to forge United States victory than anyone save Lincoln, came to inspire far less admiration across the United States than the principal Rebel chieftain.⁵

Although there was no official Lost Cause interpretation, several themes stand out as crucial for later explorations of films and artworks. Former Confederates faced the challenge of salvaging honor amid devastating defeat and horrendous human and material loss. Toward this end, they argued that northern numbers and material resources had been too great to overcome and stressed the enormous amount of physical destruction in the Confederacy. The United States had enjoyed an advantage in manpower of approximately two-and-one-half to one, but Lost Cause advocates typically lengthened even those odds. Confederate armies, they insisted, had waged a gallant but hopeless fight that bequeathed to subsequent generations of white southerners a noble legacy. In July 1876, the editor of the Southern Historical Society Papers called for increased attention to this subject. Pronouncing the “relative strength of the Federal and Confederate armies … a matter of great importance,” he suggested that “even our own people are in profound ignorance of the great odds against which we fought, while Northern writers have persistently misrepresented the facts.” Few Lost Cause warriors devoted more attention to northern numbers and industrial advantages than Jubal A. Early. A highly influential figure in debates about the memory of the conflict, he characterized the campaign Lee and Grant waged in 1864 as “a contest between mechanical power and physical strength, on the one hand, and the gradually diminishing nerve and sinew of Confederate soldiers, on the other, until the unlimited resources of our enemies must finally prevail over all the genius and chivalric daring, which had so long baffled their mighty efforts in the field.” Early’s juxtaposing outnumbered Confederates against limitless, mechanistic northern power resonated immediately among vanquished white southerners, and among later generations of Americans as well.⁶

The theme of admirable striving against irresistible United States power found expression in stone as well as in print. In 1903, for example, veterans dedicated an imposing monument on the capitol grounds in Austin, Texas, that underestimated Confederate strength by about 300,000 and overestimated that of United States forces by more than 650,000. The text read in part: “The South, Against Overwhelming Numbers and Resources, Fought Until Exhausted. … Number Of Men Enlisted: Confederate Armies, 600,000; Federal Armies, 2,859,132.” Contending against odds of almost five to one, as the Texas memorial would have it (the seeming exactness of the Union figure lends verisimilitude to the invention), set a standard that could be used to instruct later generations. A monument erected in 1909 in Charlottesville, Virginia, offered such a lesson: “Warriors: Your Valour; Your Devotion to Duty; Your Fortitude Under Privations; Teach Us How to Suffer And Grow Strong.”⁷

Lost Cause writers understood that slavery posed the greatest obstacle to their constructing a version of secession and war that would position them favorably before the bar of history. They knew their slaveholding society had been out of step with the tide of Western history, and they sought to remove that stigma from their record by presenting slavery as peripheral to the decision for secession and to the establishment of the Confederate nation. They said they had fought in defense of constitutional principles as the true inheritors of a revolutionary tradition that invested great power in the states and localities and viewed central governmental authority with alarm. Among the most prominent Lost Cause writers were Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens, who had served, respectively, as president and vice president of the Confederacy. Stephens evidently coined the term “War Between the States,” which soon achieved wide currency among former Confederates. The two men had become implacable political enemies during the war (Stephens believed Davis exercised too much national power in the course of trying to mount a military effort capable of securing independence), but their postwar writings complemented one another.

Those writings underscore the ways in which Lost Cause figures attempted to rewrite history regarding the centrality of slavery. In the spring of 1861, as the Confederate government began its stormy life, both Stephens and Davis acknowledged slavery’s importance to their experiment in nation-building. On March 21, in his famous “Cornerstone Speech,” Stephens observed that the new Confederate constitution “put at rest forever all the agitating question relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists among us. … This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution,” Stephens averred, adding without equivocation, “Our new government is founded upon …, its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Shortly thereafter, Davis justified secession on the grounds that Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party planned to exclude slavery from the territories, in turn rendering “property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars.” Confronted with this threat to economic “interests of such overwhelming magnitude,” added Davis, “the people of the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced.”⁸

The two men’s postwar memoirs told a different story. In A Constitutional View of the Late War between the States, a tedious two-volume work published in 1868 and 1870, Stephens did his best to push slavery into the background. He claimed that the “war had its origin in opposing principles… a strife between the principles of Federation, on the one side, and Centralism, or Consolidation, on the other. Slavery, so called, was but the question on which these antagonistic principles, which had been in conflict, from the beginning, on divers other questions, were finally brought into actual and active collision with each other on the field of battle.” Davis took a similar tack in his two-volume memoir titled The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. He asserted that the South waged war solely for the inalienable right of a people to change their government—to leave a Union into which, as sovereign states, they had entered voluntarily. “The truth remains intact and incontrovertible,” Davis stated, echoing Stephens, “that the existence of African servitude was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.”⁹

Where Lost Cause writers engaged slavery, they did so with an eye toward proving African Americans had demonstrated great loyalty to their masters amid the war’s upheaval. Memoirs and histories of Confederate military units abound with examples of slaves assisting wounded masters, helping white women and their families on farms and plantations, and spurning Yankee invaders. The pages of Confederate Veteran, the official magazine of the largest Confederate veterans’ organization, offers ample evidence of this dimension of the Lost Cause version of the war. One representative article in the Veteran discusses a proposed monument, to be erected in either Montgomery or Richmond, that would pay tribute “to the memory of the old-time Southern negro. The loyal devotion of the men and women who were slaves has had no equal in all history.” Beyond individual examples of such “loyalty,” Lost Cause advocates usually insisted that slavery as an institution had “Christianized” and otherwise benefited the African American. “In his native land he has never reached the dignity of a civilized being, and he has never been civilized until transplanted into slavery,” wrote one former Confederate. “Whatever of eminence any individual of the race has attained, is due directly or indirectly to the civilizing influence of the institution of slavery. It was the master of slaves who accomplished the greatest missionary success and the progress of his ward since is due to the training and influence of the past.”¹⁰

FIGURE 2. Portrait of Alexander H. Stephens that served as the frontispiece for the second volume of A Constitutional View of the Late War between the States. Author’s collection.

Robert E. Lee took the place of slavery at the center of much Lost Cause literature. This centrality continued a trend that by the war’s midpoint had seen Lee assume the position of being by far the most important Confederate figure. During and after the war, white southerners often compared Lee to George Washington, and between 1863 and 1865 Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia had functioned as the Confederacy’s most important national institution. Lee represented the best card the Lost Cause writers could play in seeking a sympathetic audience. Widely praised even in the North as a self-effacing Christian gentleman, Lee had won almost all of the Confederacy’s great military victories. He sometimes contended against odds as great as two to one, which allowed Lost Cause warriors to cast him and his soldiers as stalwart heroes engaged in a valiant but hopeless struggle. Stonewall Jackson, a deeply religious and personally idiosyncratic subordinate of enormous talent, usually stood at Lee’s right arm. The Lee-Jackson partnership, which lasted just eleven months, between June 1862 and May 1863, inspired Lost Cause authors and speakers to search for superlatives that conveyed the duo’s greatness. The final act of their collaboration closed with Jackson’s death in the wake of southern victory at Chancellorsville and became one of the iconic moments of Confederate remembrance.

Yet it was not enough to praise Lee and Jackson. Lost Cause adherents often deprecated Grant in the course of assigning military virtue to their heroes. In 1878, for example, a piece in the Southern Historical Society Papers mounted a shrill attack on Grant in response to the Union general-in-chief’s observation that he “never ranked Lee as high as some others of the army.” The Overland campaign of 1864 left Lee’s utter supremacy beyond doubt, suggested the author of the piece indignantly: “Lee foiled Grant in every move he made, defeated him in every battle they fought, and so completely crushed him in that last trial of strength at Cold Harbor, that his men refused to attack again … and the government at Washington would have been ready to give up the struggle if its further prosecution had depended alone on ‘the great butcher.’” Such assertions overlooked the fact that Confederate casualties during the six-week campaign had been proportionately heavier than Grant’s and that by mid-June Lee faced the type of siege at Petersburg he most feared.¹¹

The emphasis on Lee and his army gave precedence to military events in Virginia and the rest of the Eastern Theater. Gettysburg became a retrospective dividing point for many ex-Confederates, and the battle took on much greater importance in Lost Cause writings than it had enjoyed during the conflict. Former Confederate general John B. Gordon’s widely read memoirs exemplify this point: “Whatever differences of opinion may now or hereafter exist as to the results which might have followed a defeat of the Union arms at Gettysburg, there is universal concurrence in the judgment that this battle was the turning-point in the South’s fortunes.” Seeking a scapegoat to absolve Lee of responsibility for the defeat at Gettysburg, Lost Cause writers in the mid-1870s began a long campaign to fix blame on James Longstreet (Secon...