Also by Wolfgang Schivelbusch 作品
In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945–1948
Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants
Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century
1
THE AMERICAN SOUTH
The American Civil War squats in the middle of the nineteenth century like a monstrous irony. In Europe, the dominant powers had rationalized, even civilized warfare so that outcomes were reached quickly on precisely delimited battlefields, without great bloodshed—or even significant inconvenience—among civilian populations. Meanwhile, the United States, the nation that had been the embodiment of peaceful civic progress and republican reason, plunged into war with a bellicose fury that had not been seen since the Wars of Religion. It seemed incomprehensible that such a young, prosperous, and promising nation state could be determined to destroy itself so prematurely. Was this the work of an Old Testament God who, in disappointment or anger, had abandoned his people so soon after he had chosen them?
A few statistics suffice to illustrate the extent of the human and material destruction during the Civil War. The nation as a whole suffered 620,000 casualties, or 2 percent of its (white) population, more than in the two world wars and the Korean War combined. Add to that the destruction of territory and property: on the one hand, the systematic razing of cities, together with the burning of plantations and large stretches of agricultural land (the practice known as “Shermanizing”); on the other, the “disappropriation,” in the form of the emancipation of slaves, of a capital resource whose estimated value was some four billion dollars.
It is clear from the statistics who the main loser was. The Confederacy bore the brunt of the wartime destruction. The 260,000 Southerners who fell in the war, out of a total white population of 5.5 million, represented a casualty rate of 5 percent, compared with 1.8 percent in the North. The South lost 20 percent of its white adult male population—an extraordinarily exact parallel to German casualties during World War II.1 The long-term damage these losses inflicted on the South’s social and economic fabric is evident in such poignant facts as that a fifth of Mississippi’s first postwar state budget was devoted to the production of prosthetic limbs for those maimed in the fighting.2
Twentieth-century historiography has treated the American Civil War as the first example of total warfare and as a precursor to the two world wars. This view, while certainly true, obscures what is perhaps a more obvious comparison. Until 1861, the American experience of war was largely of the colonial variety. The military campaigns against Native Americans followed different rules from those governing a regular war between two armies. The goal of the Indian wars was not the destruction of the enemy’s forces, but the destruction of the enemies themselves. The wars were as much a part of land clearing as the deforestation of primeval woodlands and the burning of the prairies. At the beginning of one such Indian campaign, General Philip Henry Sheridan issued an order to his sub-commanders: “Let it be a campaign of annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.”3 Sheridan and his more famous colleague William T. Sherman would continue their scorched-earth policy during the Civil War. The only strategic component omitted when they transferred this practice from a colonial to an internal enemy (that is, one who belonged to their own civilization) was genocide.
A few years after the end of the Civil War, Sheridan was invited to meet Prussia’s general staff during that country’s war against France. He was astonished by the traditional tactics used by Prussian general Helmut von Moltke and recommended that the Prussians follow Sherman’s and his own example: “The proper strategy consists in … causing the inhabitants so much suffering that they must long for peace, and force the government to demand it. The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.”4 Before embracing the practice of total warfare, however, most military commanders in the North had had to overcome ethical resistance similar to that of Moltke. The military high commander during the first phase of the Civil War, General George B. McClellan, was unwilling to draw the enemy civilian population into the fighting as a way of offsetting the South’s military and strategic superiority. It was not until McClellan was replaced by Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant that the path was cleared for total warfare. As the side on whose territory the fighting was conducted, and that would therefore suffer most from total war, the South understandably rejected such practices. Nonetheless, it would be incorrect to say that the Confederacy refused to engage in total warfare just because it lacked the opportunity to carry it to the enemy. In the one instance when the South did operate in Northern territory, the campaign of Gettysburg, the Confederate army largely adhered to the rules of traditional warfare. The only exception was the destruction of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and even there Robert E. Lee authorized the burning of the town not to inaugurate a larger strategy but as an act of retribution for the Southern cities destroyed by the North. As the commander who carried out the action, General Jubal Early, stated: “I came to the conclusion that it was time to open the eyes of the North to [the barbarism of their methods], by an example in the way of retaliation.”5
Exceptionalism
Military ethics was only one of many areas in which North and South differed. The separate identities of North and South date back to the establishment of the first British colonies in North America. The distinct geography and climate of the two regions gave rise to both economic and mythological dissimilarities. The prevailing image of the North, with its harsh winters and largely Puritan settlers, was that of the wilderness: the world after the fall from grace and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. In contrast, the non-Puritan South with its friendlier climate became heir to the Elizabethan conception of the New World as a garden, an earthly paradise. Whereas New England Puritans devoted their lives to transforming the wilderness back into Eden through hard work, the purpose of life for the Virginians (as Northerners referred to all inhabitants of the South during the eighteenth century) was the epicurean enjoyment of the garden that Providence had bestowed on them.6 The social and economic systems that evolved in the two regions, free wage labor in the North and slavery in the South, resulted from the interplay of climatological, ideological, and mythological differences. It is moot whether the South “opted for” slavery in order to maintain its epicurean lifestyle, while the North valorized hard work as the key to salvation, or whether these mentalities developed out of the existing economic systems. By the eighteenth century, the separate economic, social, and cultural identities of the two regions were well established.
Upper-class European visitors found that the “Americanism” first identified by Alexis de Tocqueville applied above all, perhaps even exclusively, to the North. The South appeared by comparison more European and aristocratic. After the Civil War, one liberal English publisher and detractor of the Confederacy, William Hepworth Dixon, summed up what generations of European travelers since the eighteenth century had perceived as the cultural superiority of the South over the North:
A tourist from the Old World—one of the idler classes—found himself much at home in these country mansions. The houses were well planned and built; the furniture was rich; the table and the wine were good; the books, the prints, the music, were such as he had known in Europe.… The South was made pleasant to its English guest; for the people felt that the English were of nearer kin to them than their Yankee brethren. A sunny sky, a smiling hostess, an idle life, and a luxurious couch, led him softly to forget the foundations on which that seducing fabric stood. In the Northern States such a lotus-eater would have found but little to his taste. The country-houses … were not so spacious and so splendid as in the South; the climate was much colder; and the delights of lounging were much less. He had nothing to do, and nobody had time to help him. The men being all intent on their affairs, they neither hunted, fished, nor danced; they talked of scarcely anything but their mills, their mines, their roads, their fisheries; they were always eager, hurried, and absorbed, as though the universe hung upon their arms, and they feared to let it fall.… In the … sunny Southern houses, with their long verandas, their pleasant lawns, no man was busy, no woman was in haste. Every one had time for wit, for compliment, for small talk.7
The hardworking, profit-obsessed, religious/moral-fundamentalist Yankee became the embodiment of New England, while the contemplative, cultivated gentleman—or “cavalier,” as he would later be called—came to represent the South. As long as their respective regions functioned as a harmonious unit, the two types could coexist without rancor. There is nary a hint of distrust or distaste in James Fenimore Cooper’s 1828 observation “that in proportion to the population, there are more men who belong to what is termed the class of gentlemen, in the old southern States of America than in any other country of the world.… I do not know where to find gentlemen of better air or better breeding throughout, than most of those I have met in the southern Atlantic States.”8 The Puritan North did not resent the South for prizing the classics of antiquity above the King James Bible, nor did it object that the highest political offices in the land, from the presidency to the Senate to the Supreme Court, as well as the leadership of the military, were disproportionately occupied by Southerners trained in classical rhetoric.9 As Southerner James D. B. DeBow wrote in 1851: “The Southern slave states of Greece and Rome had given to the world all the civilization, laws and government which antiquity offered.… The civilization of the world has come from the South as all history shows.”10 The South’s conceit that it produced the Catos, Ciceros, and Scipios of the American republic and its insistence that its economic system was the extension of classical models attracted scant opposition as long as slavery was considered morally acceptable and as long as the South remained the superior within the national economy.
Beginning in 1830, however, the South was put on the defensive on both fronts. Under President Andrew Jackson, industrialization in the North took off at a furious pace, and the North soon outstripped the South economically. At the same time, slavery came in for increasing moral criticism. The South suffered a bout of collective panic after the bloody slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in 1831, and within a year open debates on the morality of slavery had become taboo. The South’s suppression of all discussion put an end to its traditional role as the national seat of enlightenment.11
This double development upset the balance of economic and political power between the two regions, to the South’s manifest disadvantage. The reaction there, as in other cases of historical decline, was varied. As cultural historian Rollin G. Osterweis puts it, the South was “slipping into the position of a minority people under attack.”12 Until 1830, the North had acted as an agent of the plantation in all its significant economic activities, including the slave trade, the transportation of tobacco and cotton to Europe, and credit and finance. It was therefore no wonder that the South felt abandoned and betrayed by the North’s sudden moral and economic turnaround. In the decades before the Civil War, Southerners were full of resentment at the moral hypocrisy of former slave-trade profiteers in Boston and at the selective memory of the North in general as to the origins of its wealth. There was also a mood of elegiac pessimism comparable to that of Don Fabrizio in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, who sees in the new relations of power the inevitable end of his civilization. “We, who once swayed the councils of the Union, find our power gone, and our influence on the wane,” mourned one member of Virginia’s traditional elite in 1852. “As the other States accumulate the means of material greatness, and glide past us on the road to wealth and empire, we slight the warnings of statistics, and drive lazily along the fields of ancient customs.” Hugh Swinton Legaré, an exemplary representative of the Southern politician-intellectual, remarked as early as 1832: “We are (I am quite sure) the last of the race of South Carolina. I see nothing before us but decay and downfall.”13 Cynics remarked: “We occupy virtually the same relation to the Yankee that the negroes do to us.”14
Another reaction to the challenges suddenly posed by the North was evident in the yearning to secede. The roots of secession can be found in a new definition of slavery that began to gain currency among Southerners. Before 1830, slavery had been viewed in both the South and the North as a necessary evil. Within a few years, however, it had become nothing less than the basis of a new national doctrine, grounded in theology, philosophy, and sociology, of the Southern plantation system’s superiority over the industral capitalism of the North.
Slavery as “Socialism”
“We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”15 Thomas Jefferson’s words, spoken in the age of enlightenment and the rights of man, long epitomized the prevailing sentiment in the South toward the problem of slavery. Before the South broke off the slavery debate in 1830, quashing any further questioning of the system, the discussion was conducted there with an intensity that had no equivalent in the North. As historian C. Vann Woodward points out, Southern critics of slavery “spoke against the effect on the master as well as on the slave; they exposed the harm done to the manners and morals of the South as well as its economy and society. Nor were the critics mere misfits and radicals. They included men of influence and standing—politicians, editors, professors, and clergymen. Antislavery thought appeared in respectable newspapers.… In the 1820s the slave states contained a great many more antislavery societies than the free states and furnished leadership for the movement in the country.”16
Within a decade, however, all that had changed. Justifying slavery as its “peculiar institution,” the South began its counterreformation against the antislavery agitation emerging in the North. The jesuitic cleverness applied to this task is fascinating even today. Strategically, the notion of the peculiar institution was a retreat into the offensive. Proslavery theoreticians depicted the system less as a positive good in its own right than as an alternative to unconstrained capitalist exploitation. For them, the antithesis of slavery was not freedom but wage labor. “We are all, North and South, engaged in the White Slave Trade,” argued George Fitzhugh, “and he who succeeds best, is esteemed most respectable. It is far more cruel than the Black Slave Trade, because it exacts more of its slaves, and neither protects nor governs them.” Attacking the industrial capitalists of the North, he continued: “You, with the command over labor which your capital gives you, are a slave owner—a master, without the obligations of a master. They who work for you, who create your income, are slaves, without the rights of slaves.”17 John C. Calhoun, the preeminent Southern statesman in the decades preceding the Civil War, defined slavery as a system in which the conflict between capital and labor was resolved by the slave owner’s possessing both.18
Though by no means socialists themselves, politician-intellectuals like Calhoun and Fitzhugh were intimately familiar with the socialist literature of their day, and their arguments often resembled those of socialism. “Every plantation is an organized community,” wrote Fitzhugh’s contemporary William Grayson. He cited the ideas of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, whose vision of the “phalanstery” perfectly described the plantation, “where all work, where each member gets subsistence and a home and the more industrious larger pay and profits to their own superior industry.”19 For Fitzhugh, the most widely read and radical proponent of this school, the ideas of slavery and socialism were interchangeable. “Slavery is a form, and the very best form of socialism,” he writes in his Sociology for the South (1854), whereas in another passage he asserts, with a whiff of sarcasm, that socialism is “the new fashionable name for slavery.”20 Fitzhugh himself was introduced to Fourier’s thought through the writings of Horace Greeley, and the phalanstery was a model Fitzhugh saw as a possible form of social order, lacking only a patriarchal leader. Of one of Greeley’s projects, Fitzhugh remarked: “Socialism with such [a] despotic head, approaches very near to Southern slavery. Add a Virginian overseer to Mr. Greeley’s Phalansteries, and Mr. Greeley and we would have little to quarrel about.” In light of this affinity, Fitzhugh’s explicitly stated goal of subjecting the white proletariat to slavery eerily anticipates the authoritarian socialism of the twentieth century.
As with every ideology, there was a kernel of truth to the idea of slavery as a positive good and a human right. Even visitors from Europe and the North who were dedicated opponents of slavery admitted as much. Michel Chevalier found the majority of slaves in the 1830s to be “less severely tasked, better fed, and better taken care of than most peasants in Europe. Their rapid increase attests their easy condition.”21 Charles Francis Adams Jr., a passionate abolitionist who became acquainted with the South firsthand as a soldier in the Union Army, confessed: “The conviction is forcing itself upon me that African slavery, as it existed in our slave states, was indeed a patriarchal institution under which the slaves were not, as a whole, unhappy, cruelly treated or overworked.”22
It may seem ironic that, half a century after Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, a number of fellow Southerners would declare slavery the system that best ensured the rights of man. But this new interpretation of an old institution was the logical outgrowth of the desire to formulate a specific historical mission for the American South. The sharpening of the language Southerners used to describe themselves and their Northern rivals after 1830 was one important aspect of this project. As the years passed, the nickname “Yankee” lost its affectionate connotations and increasingly came to evoke a gaunt, cold, greedy, miserly, and sanctimonious bigot. When the Yankee talked about God, Southerners believed, he meant Mammon; when he condemned slavery in the South as a mortal sin, he concealed both his own role in the slave trade and the Negroes’ pariah status in his own neck of the woods. Indeed, in the South’s understanding of the situation, the Yankee was the one actually responsible for the introduction of slavery to the colonies. It was he who, in his thirst for profits, had opened the slave trade in which the Southern farmer-planter was merely the innocent buyer, the dupe of the system. Mary Boykin Chestnut, for instance, wrote in her diary in 1861: “They say our crowning misdemeanor is to hold in slavery still those Africans they brought over here from Africa, or sold to us when they found to own them did not pay. They gradually slid them off down here, giving themselves years to get rid of them in a remunerative way.”23
A precursor to the antisemitic bogeyman of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Yankee was the Shylock from whose viselike clutches the South had to free itself in order to survive. The only means available was a war of independence like the one the colonies had waged against England a few generations before. And indeed the thesis of a second Revolutionary War provided the moral and legal framework for Southern secession. It became an article of faith allowing the South to band together in 1861 and eliciting an astonishing sympathy for the Confederacy in Europe, which was otherwise opposed to slavery.24
A Nation of Knights
The hardening of language between North and South in the years 1830–60 was also signaled by the replacement of the word gentleman by the term cavalier in the Southern vocabulary. This was nothing less than an act of linguistic secession. Whereas no one had any reservations about the positive character of the gentleman, with even the North acknowledging the South’s superior capacity for producing this ideal type, the rise of the cavalier brought with it division and enmity. For Northerners, the cavalier was the direct descendant of the Spanish aristocrat, with all his negative attributes: arrogance, laziness, cruelty, and decadence. Moreover, the term made explicit reference to the civil war in seventeenth-century England. Just as the royalist Cavaliers had defended a higher culture against the attacks of the Puritan Roundheads, the cavalier South was now taking a stand against the Yankee Roundhead North.
According to this “invented tradition” that emerged in the prewar years, the colonies had been settled by two separate, incompatible groups, the North by Puritan Roundheads “squabbling, fighting, singing psalms, burning witches, and talking about liberty,” the South by cavaliers, “persons belonging to the blood and race of the reigning family … directly descended from the Norman Barons of William the Conqueror, a race distinguished, in its earliest history, for its warlike and fearless character, a race, in all time since, renowned for its gallantry, its honor, its gentleness and its intellect.”25 Moreover, the North was not only puritanical and fanatic in its convictions but plebeian in its ancestry. Yankees, Roundheads, and Anglo-Saxons belonged to a single tribe, one that had never gotten over its defeat at Hastings in 1066 and that had developed the typical resentment of a subjugated people toward a superior race. By contrast, everyone in the South had aristocratic or even regal blood in his or her veins. Robert E. Lee, later to become the Confederacy’s national hero, was depicted as the descendant of everyone from Robert the Bruce of Scotland to Lancelot Lee, a follower of William the Conqueror. The family chronicles of humble farmers often contained such passages as “Hans Muller, a carpenter by trade and the son of Max Muller, who was the son of a Hamburg merchant and the daughter of a German emperor.”26 Even classical antiquity turned up in Southern family history. Before 1830, appreciation of Athens’s and Rome’s contribution to Southern culture was largely confined to the educated elite. But in the years that followed, direct family lineages were frequently “traced” back to the age of Pericles—a glorious early example of a civilization based on slavery—and brazenly announced to the world as proven fact.27
The South thus experienced the historical events of 1830–60 on two symbolic levels: as a repeat of the American rebellion against England and as a continuation of the seventeenth-century English civil war, with the South as the reincarnated Cavaliers and the North as the Roundheads. In addition, the South would discover a historical drama in which it could recognize its own cause even more clearly.
The Scottish Model
Scotland was the inspiration for romantic movements throughout Europe and North America in the late eighteenth century. The various national variants of romanticism chose among the corpus of material provided by James McPherson and his successors, adapting whatever seemed most suitable to their own purposes. For the American colonies and the young United States, Scotland served above all as a political and cultural role model. Scotland was the land of perpetual rebellion against England, a nation that defended itself valiantly against its mighty neighbor, forever coming out on the losing end and yet always demonstrating its virtue, its dignity, its moral strength, and its character. Scotland was the model of an anti-England that young America could emulate in its struggle to form itself into an independent nation. True to the dictum that nothing unites like a common enemy, Scotland’s “protest history” and the idea of “greedy Egypt/England holding Israel/Scotland in bondage” were embraced across the Atlantic as a national cause.28
The South occupied a special place within this American-Scottish connection, both economically (since Glasgow—and not London—was the center of the eighteenth-century tobacco trade, the most important economic activity in the colonies) and in terms of immigration. With every unsuccessful rebellion, a wave of Scottish immigrants like William Faulkner’s literary dynasty, the Compsons—poured into America, largely into the South, where the English-Puritan influence was weaker than in the North. According to recent research on the history of emigration, many people in the South were indeed of Scottish ancestry, if not the aristocratic one of myth.29 If we replace the imaginary cavaliers of the house of Stuart with the masses of farmers and peasants who actually emigrated from Scotland, we get a more or less accurate picture of Southern heritage, as well as an appreciation for the Scotland-obsessed culture of the South. “The Scottish tradition … must have had a place in the ‘cultural baggage’ which the Scotch-Irish pioneer carried with him,” Rollin Osterweis writes, “even if it were only in the form of fragmentary folk ballads and crude legends.… The tradition of the ‘clan gathering about the chief,’ accepting his leadership without question in times of stress, is familiar to every student of the history of Scotland. The Southern farmer displays an instinctive tendency to ‘stand to his captain,’ to look to his aristocratic neighbor for leadership, whenever the need arises.”30
Other symbols of Scottish independence were adopted after 1861, such as the St. Andrew’s Cross, appropriated for the war flag of the Confederacy, and the Highlanders’ burning cross, which, in another transposition of literature into reality, became the chief symbol of the Ku Klux Klan, whose very name left no doubt as to which tradition was being invoked.31 The history of unsuccessful Scottish rebellions—above all the final one, which was led by the twenty-year-old pretender Charles Edward and was put down at the battle of Culloden in 1745—was retold in countless tales and songs. Bonnie Prince Charlie and his “lost cause” became central to the folklore of the South, a figure who would rise up and intervene in times of national crisis.
Walter Scottland
The one person whose influence is acknowledged by virtually all historians of the antebellum South is Sir Walter Scott. “While the rest of America read Scott with enthusiasm,” Osterweis records, “the South assimilated his works into [its] very being.” W. J. Cash writes: “Scott was bodily taken over by the South and incorporated into the Southern people’s vision of themselves.” Edmund Wilson notes that Scott exercised an “intoxicating effect” on the South. And Mark Twain asserted in 1883 that the “Sir Walter disease” had left the South permanently incapable of apprehending reality: “Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the War, that he is in great measure responsible for the War.”32 Just as historians date the beginning of Southern separatism to 1830, so, too, do the advocates of the Walter Scottland thesis.33 Before then, the South didn’t respond to Scott’s novels any differently from the North or the rest of the world. Only in subsequent decades did the South begin to internalize Scott’s literature to the extent that, as Osterweis says, “instead of looking awkwardly for the days of knighthood … [it was] convinced that it [was] living in them.”34
Scott, however, was a complex and varied author. Which of his novels was the South’s favorite source? The immediate assumption will be that it was the chronicler of the Scottish lost-cause rebellions, the author of Waverly, whom the South selected as its new Virgil. Waverly would seem to be a parable for and an elegy to the lifestyle, the self-conception, and the historical situation of the South. In the story of the blue-blooded clan that takes to the battlefield against a materially superior, more efficient, but coldly mercantilist England, the South could hardly fail to recognize itself. The fact that the Scots were defeated could only cathartically confirm the South’s sense of its own worth. Waverly was perfectly suited to be the national epic for the South, much as the Song of Roland and the Nibelungenlied were for nineteenth-century France and Germany. Nothing seems to elevate a nation more than the demise of its heroes in hopeless struggle against a faceless mass of invaders, whether they go under the name of the English, the Saracens, or Etzel’s Huns.
Yet it was not primarily Scott’s lost-cause novels (Rob Roy and Red Gauntlet, along with Waverly) but rather his medieval romances, such as Ivanhoe, that fired the imagination of Southern readers. In contrast to Waverly, with its tragic, elegiac mood, Ivanhoe is boisterous, active, colorful, and vivid. Scott’s fictional treatment of the Middle Ages, however, is not the sentimental and one-dimensional picture the Victorian public saw it as. It is full of ironic ruptures and develops the motif of a struggle between a venerable but obsolete past and a prosaic present. But these subtleties are obscured by the lavishly romantic medieval accoutrements, which were the exclusive interest of Southern readers. It is easy to see an escapist mechanism at work in this selective reading. And indeed, the implicit assumption of the Walter Scottland thesis is that the South withdrew into a mythical fortress of romantic chivalry free from all disturbing elements of reality, barricading itself against the outside world or—which amounts to the same thing—encountering it only as an Ivanhoe-Quixote.
But this interpretation overstates the importance of the cult of chivalry. Southerners may indeed have donned knightly garb with ridiculous frequency (contemporary accounts describe the South as a “fairyland where young men saw themselves as knights going to a tournament and girls were Queens of Love and Beauty rewarding them”); the reality, however, was more complex.35 The South’s simultaneous identification with the Scottish clans, the Stuart cavaliers, and the Lost Cause makes it impossible to ignore the concurrent elegiac mood. Although perhaps more subtle than the identification with chivalry, the South’s preoccupation with images of defeat and demise was no less significant. How else can one account for the immediate emergence of the Lost Cause as the South’s central myth after the collapse of the Confederacy? Myths are often kept in reserve, left to wait their turn, and the Lost Cause in all its continuations and variations is no exception. Historian Michael O’Brien concisely sums up the situation: “Certainly few cultures have been better prepared ideologically for the disaster of war. Ruins are vivid in Southern thought long before Columbia was reduced to ashes.”36
The image of the South as Walter Scottland remains valid, but it is necessary to differentiate between two discrete versions of it. On the one hand, there was Ivanhoe Land, a world of passionate escapism and whistling in the dark, as naive as it was carefree. On the other, there was Waverly Land, an elegiac world of imminent decline and demise. It is hardly unique for the mood of a nation to be split in this way; indeed, tensions, ruptures, and doubts do not follow clear group or regional lines and are often present in a single individual. The remarkable thing about the mentality of the prewar South was that, despite the confusion and ambivalence created by the two contradictory moods, they conformed to clearly distinguishable regional borders. The cult of chivalry was concentrated in the Cotton Belt, the territories in the Deep South colonized after 1800 (Alabama and Mississippi), while the elegiac set the tone in the Old South (Virginia and the Carolinas). Significantly, these two regions also differed in their economic, social, and cultural structures. The picture of a stagnant South lagging behind the North is not sufficiently nuanced. It was not the entire economy of the South but rather only that of the Old South that turned sluggish after 1830. The new Cotton South, propelled by constantly rising prices for its staple product, experienced an economic boom comparable to that of the industrializing North. Moreover, in their attitudes toward technology and economics, the agrarian cotton barons were closer to the industrialists of the North than they were to their farmer colleagues in the Old South, who still managed their estates in eighteenth-century style. As recent studies have demonstrated, the cotton planters were a generation of entrepreneurs, so-called new men, who probably would have made their way equally well in the industrial centers of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois.37 The single, all-decisive factor that distinguished them from their counterparts in the North was that even the most modern, dynamic, capitalist cotton planter was a slave owner, bound to a system that possessed regional—but not global—validity. The slave economy was like a reservation, allowed to exist only in a restricted and perpetually shrinking area, outside which the capital invested in slaves was no longer legal tender. Slavery yoked the entrepreneurs of the New South to the mugwumps of the Old South, ensuring that neither could avoid their joint destiny.*
If the Scottian cult of chivalry blossomed primarily in the economically vibrant New South, while finding noticeably less resonance in the Old, then the thesis of the escapist function of the cult obviously requires revision. The purpose behind all the medieval mimicry was not to suppress the reality of stagnation and to flee from social decline via romance but to dress up and decorate what was actually an ongoing process of economic modernization and expansion. Scott’s knightly romanticism played a role in the South similar to that of Richard Wagner’s Teutonic mythology in Prussian-led Germany. The “exceptional” path toward modernization taken by the South and by Prussian Germany is well summed up by Barrington Moore Jr.’s formulation: “a capitalist civilization … but hardly a bourgeois one.”38
America’s Sparta
When the South embarked on the Civil War in 1861, it seemed to have no hope of winning it. The material superiority of the North was breathtaking: it possessed five times the population and almost ten times the industrial production capacity for goods essential for war, such as raw iron, firearms, munitions, textiles, and boots.39 Nonetheless, after the first year of war, it was the South that appeared, at least in the eyes of the world, to be poised to triumph, controlling the action in the arena like a matador while the North plodded around like a clumsy bull. This image resulted from the South’s spate of early military victories. Yet, before battles could be won, the necessary armies had to be recruited and outfitted. The South was faced with the dual task of raising its armies and constructing its industries from the ground up. Despite its agrarian past and its romantic-chivalric mentality, the South met these challenges, as Michael O’Brien puts it, “with remarkable thoroughness and little ideological discomfort.”40 How was this possible?
On closer examination, the Confederacy’s achievement may not have been so surprising after all. In all likelihood, it was the “organic” product of the prewar South’s characteristic combination of technological-economic modernity and feudal-romantic culture. Perhaps the sudden creation of large industrial complexes, including the second-largest munitions factory in the world, followed a fundamentally different pattern than the familiar process of liberal-capitalist industrialization. The thesis proposed by economic historian Raimondo Luraghi—that the South operated a system of wartime state socialism—may overstate the case somewhat: “No country,” he writes, “from the Inca Empire to Soviet Russia has ever possessed a similar government-owned, or controlled, kind of economy.”41 But his thesis underscores the affinity with the “Prussian path” of successfully synthesizing old-school military values and industrialism.
The second aspect of the South’s dual mobilization was its exploitation of its military potential. It was common knowledge in 1861 in both parts of the country that the South possessed a superior military culture and tradition and that the cavalier, true to his name, made for a better warrior than the Yankee. At the time, Virginia was known as the “Mother of Generals” in the United States. While the seven most prominent family dynasties in Massachusetts produced a total of nine army officers, twenty officers during the same period came from just two Virginian families (Lee and Randolph). According to other statistics, 80 percent of prewar Southern presidents came from a military background, whereas 80 percent of their colleagues from the North were “without military experience of any kind.”42 The bravado of the Southern cavalry during the Mexican War of 1848 remained relatively fresh in people’s memories and had established the superiority—indeed infallibility—of Southern troops as a popular myth. The North’s image of Southern military superiority was not unlike pre-1914 European appraisals of Prussian German militarism: a mixture of respect, ridicule, and moral outrage. Everyone assumed that slavery was the reason for Southern militarism: just as Sparta needed its military capabilities to suppress the Helots, the South depended on armed force to keep the slaves in their place. The permanent threat of rebellion did in fact ensure that military vigilance never lapsed. Moreover, the uprisings that periodically occurred produced a state of constant military alert, allowing for the lightning-quick mobilization that made such an impression on the surprised observers at the beginning of the war. The Confederacy’s quasi-feudal social structure, in which the plantation owner, like the chief of a Scottish clan, was at the same time a regional military commander, completed the precisely calibrated and efficient military machine. The tournaments patterned after Scott’s novels were also inspired by military concerns. Similar in popularity to sports such as rugby in England and football in the American North, they were a mixture of marksmanship contests, public festivals, and military maneuvers.43
The ultimate index of the South’s superior military culture, however, was the large number of military academies and schools. The idea of a national military academy may have originated in the North with the founding of West Point in 1802, but in the following decades the South overtook the North.44 Beginning in 1830, so many academies and schools were founded that soon every one of the Confederate states could boast of its own military academy, as well as numerous private institutions. As this trend coincided with the cult of chivalry, it supports the view that technological efficiency and romanticism went hand in hand. The mission of the military academies was, after all, to ground the romantic-chivalric fantasy in an efficient military professionalism.45
Nonetheless, the South’s ability to compensate for material inferiority with superior military culture does not suffice to explain the early course of the war. Just as the German army in World War I was not truly “undefeated on the field of battle”—despite the popularity of that postwar myth—it is equally untrue that the commanders of the Confederacy were all military geniuses who were only defeated by the North’s superior troop strength and weaponry. Despite the Confederacy’s military standing, there was of course no shortage of mediocrity, incompetence, and unprofessionalism among its soldiers. On closer inspection, the South’s military superiority appears less significant than imagined. In other words, it was the myth of the South’s military genius that most influenced the outcome of the early battles. The myth was especially effective because it held sway not only in the South but in the North as well, especially among the officers corps of the Union army. As Michael C. C. Adams shows, a large number of officers came from the patrician class of New England, which rejected the speculative mercantilist spirit of the Jacksonian era and believed “that Northern manhood [had been] corrupted by money lust.”46 Northern patricians saw themselves as the last bastions of the old Republican culture. This mentality was nearly identical to that in the South, although it was not as all-consuming and it lacked comparable aesthetic symbols like that of the cavalier. Alienated from their own culture but incapable of creating an alternative, the military mugwumps of the North had little choice but to adopt the South as their role model and partake of its mythology. No Southerner could have been more flowery on the topic of innate Southern military genius as a certain Northern officer who described the soldiers he encountered in a Charleston garrison a year before the outbreak of the war as men “whose faces would help an artist to idealize a Lacedaemonian general, or a baron of the Middle Ages.”47
The Confederacy’s military victories in the early stages of the war led to a kind of folie à deux. The South felt confirmed in its chivalric romanticism, whereas the military leadership of the North lost what little self-regard it had possessed. Contemporaries blamed an “inferiority complex” and a “lack of confidence” within the Union army under General McClellan for its poor performance during the early part of the Civil War.48 This phase ended with McClellan’s dismissal and the appointment of Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, all “new men,” who felt no secret admiration for the soldierly virtues of the cavaliers or any particular alienation from the mercantile-industrial culture of the North. On the contrary, they readily adapted modern industrial methods to the conduct of war, an innovation that produced—among other things—the scorched-earth policy.
The Lost Cause
Defeated nations waste little time, after recovering from their initial shock, in finding scapegoats. The previous regime is held responsible both for leading the nation into the fateful misadventure of war and for directing it down a dead-end path long before the commencement of hostilities. Similarly, the policies and goals for which the old regime led the nation into war are often abandoned with few second thoughts. After Sedan, republican France no longer objected to a unified German nation, and after November 1918, Germany no longer contemplated achieving naval parity with England and trying to become a world power. In return, however, the victorious opponents are expected to honor the self-purification of the losing side, to renounce all punishment, and to agree to the reestablishment of the status quo ante. The outrage is thus all the greater when the winning side refuses to accept the distinction between the innocent nation and the guilty former leadership and insists that the loser pay a price, as happened after France’s defeat in 1871 and Germany’s in World War I.
The South reacted with the same sense of betrayal after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. With few exceptions, Southerners meekly renounced their claim to independence and the institution of slavery, for which they had fought so bitterly for four years. In turn, they expected the reinstatement of conditions as they were before the outbreak of hostilities. The incomprehension and outrage over being treated unfairly were therefore massive as soon it became clear that when the North spoke of “reconstruction” it did not mean the material rebuilding of the South but rather the cultural indoctrination, moral reeducation, and political subjugation of the vanquished. The South may have had no option but to give up on political independence, but like every other defeated nation, it drew a distinction between military defeat and moral victory. Under normal circumstances, nations continue to exist after their defeat and eventually return to the international arena, where they exploit such distinctions to serve the cause of revanche or redress. The South, by contrast, ceased to be a nation after the Civil War and transformed the distinction between failure on the battlefield and moral superiority into the central dogma of its new identity. In the mythologies of the vanquished, the Southern Lost Cause is unique in making sense not only of the defeat but of the entire nation itself. The South may have disappeared as a political entity but it lived on as a kind of national religion or community of faith for which the moment of defeat was as foundational and consecrating as the Crucifixion. “In the moment of death,” writes Robert Penn Warren, “the Confederation entered upon its immortality.”49
Edward A. Pollard—journalist, soldier, adventurer, and vigorous critic of the political and military leadership of the Confederacy during the war—published his version of Civil War history in 1866 under the title The Lost Cause.50 The book was several things at once: a first attempt at chronicling the events of war; a settling of accounts with the old regime, which Pollard held exclusively responsible for the South’s defeat; and an effort to make sense of that outcome. Pollard’s insistent assertions in the book’s final pages amount to the first formulation of the Lost Cause as a program for the conservation of national identity. The message was directed against the enemy’s efforts, already apparent at the time, to “reconstruct” and “reeducate” that identity out of existence. Pollard’s tome concludes:
All that is left the South is “the war of ideas.” She has thrown down the sword to take up the weapons of argument, not indeed under any banner of fanaticism, or to enforce a dogma, but simply to make the honorable conquest of reason and justice.… Defeat has not made “all our sacred things profane.” The war has left the South its own memories, its own heroes, its own tears, its own dead. Under these traditions, sons will grow to manhood, and lessons sink deep that are learned from the lips of widowed mothers. It would be immeasurably the worst consequence of defeat in this war that the South should lose its moral and intellectual distinctiveness as a people, and cease to assert its well-known superiority in civilization.… That superiority the war has not conquered or lowered; and the South will do right to claim and to cherish it.… [The Civil War] did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide State rights,… it did not decide the right of the people to show dignity in misfortune, and to maintain self-respect in the face of adversity. And these things which the war did not decide, the Southern people will still cling to, still claim, and still assert in them their rights and views.… It is not untimely or unreasonable to tell the South to cultivate her superiority as a people; to maintain her old schools of literature and scholarship; to assert, in the forms of her thought, and in the style of her manners, her peculiar civilization.… There may not be a political South. Yet there may be a social and intellectual South.51
To call Pollard the sole prophet of the Lost Cause would be incorrect. As a collective idea and an emotional necessity, the conviction was in the air that secession had been a noble but hopeless quest that Southerners had admirably insisted on pursuing. As such, the Lost Cause arose from that ambivalent consciousness of decline and cultural superiority that manifested itself in the South’s identification with Scotland, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the English Cavaliers. Nonetheless, it seems strange that a quest that was seen as spiritually triumphant should be termed “lost.” Nations do not usually embrace defeat in their mythology. Indeed, they do everything in their power to deny it or to turn the tables by imagining the victor as the loser of the next round of warfare. What motivated the South to turn the negative connotation of the term lost into something positive by coupling it with cause?
One motivation has already been discussed. The South was a romantic culture inspired by its role model, Scotland, which represented nothing less than the nostalgic sublimation of lost independence. All romanticism involves an idealization of the past, and every past is in some sense “lost.” A further explanation for the aura of the term is the centrality of Milton’s Paradise Lost in American political rhetoric. As one scholar says of its rhetorical omnipresence around 1800, “Its transcendent personages and scenes could now evaluate any historical event, from attempts at political bribery in New York through the presidential activities of Washington.… Americans had turned Milton’s epic into a measuring rod to read and assess political life of the times.”52 In the Civil War, the republic was for both sides a paradise fought over by the powers of light and darkness, God and Satan. The abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens wrote, for example, of the secession: “A rebellion only less guilty than that of the devilish angels was waged with fiendish cruelty against the best government on earth.”53 Pollard’s Lost Cause can be understood as part of this tradition, as is confirmed by the title of his subsequent book, The Lost Cause Regained (1868), with its unmistakable echo of Milton’s Paradise Regained. The South having traditionally defined itself as a “paradise on earth,” in contrast to the “wilderness” of the North, the Lost Cause was not a military defeat but a lost paradise.
The Better Men
The losing side’s conviction that its defeat is not the result of a fair fight was especially pronounced in the vanquished Confederacy. According to the self-conception that had crystallized in the years preceding the Civil War, the South’s defeat by the mean-spirited, materialistic North was incomprehensible. After all, Southern superiority had been gloriously confirmed, even acknowledged by the enemy in the military victories at the beginning of the conflict. If the war had been ultimately lost, the reasons could not have been military. What the North had waged against the South was not war at all, several writers concluded, but a reprehensible perversion that compensated for the weakness of a mercantilist culture incapable of fighting a true soldierly war.
“Failing our men in the field, this is the way they must conquer!” wrote the diarist Emma Le Conte of the burning of Columbia, South Carolina, by Sherman’s troops. The South as a whole saw the Union’s scorched-earth policy and its practice of starving out the enemy with blockades in similar terms. “They cannot whip our soldiers,” says a character in a novel by John Esten Cooke, “so they burn out and starve out our women and children.”54 For the South, the Union engaged in military encounters only when they could not be avoided and when the balance of forces, in accordance with its businesslike mercantilist calculations, was overwhelmingly in its favor: “Their armies scarcely ever ventured to fight,” an editorialist averred, “without having two or three to one.”55 The reason found for this behavior was, along with the innate cowardice and lack of sportsmanship of the pinched Yankee soul, the fact that the Union army consisted in large measure of immigrants, the “trash of Europe.”56 This was an insult to the cavalier warriors comparable to the deployment of colonial troops by the Entente in World War I, which was viewed by Germans as a violation of the rules and an affront to and a betrayal of the West. The South thus chose to interpret decades of stagnant immigration as a positive, patriotic virtue. In the same vein, the Confederacy was seen to represent the true cause of the nation whereas the North, infiltrated by foreigners, played the role of the traitor.
In its search for historical analogies, the South also discovered the French vendée, the proroyalist peasant insurrection that lasted from 1793 to 1796 and was joined by members of the local nobility. As in the lost cause of Scotland against England, Southerners saw here the unfairness of a fight in which an aristocratic culture was overwhelmed by human masses and material advantage. “Both [the Confederacy and the vendée] gained prodigious victories,” one observer noted. “Both exhibited miracles of courage and constancy, and both failed utterly and hopelessly.”57 Just as the aristocrats of the vendée were smothered by the masses during the French Revolution, the Southern cavaliers had been not defeated but suffocated by the sheer numbers of the Northern rabble. It was a battle of “bludgeon against rapier” and “of machinery against chivalry, in which the knight-errant was bound to be run over by the locomotive, if not overthrown by the windmill.”58
The choice of words is worth noting. Southerners talked not of “defeat” but of “whipping.” The axiom “We wore ourselves out whipping the enemy,” for example, expressed their belief in their own military superiority.59 At the same time, the Confederacy’s ultimate defeat was also described as a “whipping”: “Well,” went a common saying, “you have conquered us. We are whipped.”60 The word apparently had a remarkable capacity for making the unthinkable acceptable, easing its sting and annulling its ultimate effect. “To whip” in the sense of “to defeat” had an undertone of contempt. It denoted not defeat in a battle between representatives of the same class or caste but rather the mass subjugation of the “peasant” by the “officer.” Whipping also invariably called to mind the punishment of disobedient slaves. It was a ritual that the master swinging the whip and the slave at the receiving end experienced as a superficial enactment of punishment, one that went only skin deep. (Slaves may not have seen it in such a benign light.) In this way, the South distanced itself psychologically from both its victories and its defeats at the hands of a contemptible enemy. When it triumphed over the North in battle, it was the punitive master. When it was on the receiving end, whipping was a mechanistic process, almost a piece of slapstick. It seemed a grand joke to compare one’s own defeat with the lowliest form of punishment, the whipping of a slave. In short, “whipping” was the perfect mechanism to ironize and trivialize defeat.61
It is not immediately clear how such a belittling defensive reaction could be reconciled with the idea of defeat as spiritual and moral catharsis. Or how a degrading loss inflicted on “better men” by unworthy opponents could have any spiritual or moral value. But there are two fundamentally different types of defeat: the first results from a decisive battle, from the sudden recognition of one’s own inferiority, which is followed by the loss of the will to fight, then flight, dissolution, capitulation, and subjugation by the opponent’s armed forces. The second type of defeat involves no loss of the will to fight. The image of battling on to the last man, so that the end is not capitulation but extinction, plays a central role in the mythology of many cultures. In this scenario, defeat is seen as the highest form of exaltation. The Spartans at Thermopylae, Roland at Roncesvalles, and the Nibelungs in Attila’s hall are classic examples of self-sacrificing national heroism. Even in recent history, there are devastating defeats that have become part of the national pantheon: the charge of the Light Brigade in England, the World War I battle near Langemarck for the Germans, the Paris Commune for the Communist International. The central instance of heroic sacrifice for the Southern Lost Cause was Pickett’s charge at the battle of Gettysburg. Named for a commander, George E. Pickett, who in many ways resembled the stereotypical cavalier, this unsuccessful infantry offensive, which collapsed under withering Union artillery fire, served both to place the Confederacy in the tradition of grand defeats such as Thermopylae and to provide the kernel of a new myth that was all the South’s own.62
Given the deeply rooted religious conviction that death is the pathway to a higher and purer state of being, the Lost Cause was far more than merely an emotional fortress into which the South retreated to lick its wounds. The significance of the Lost Cause, as even the enemy appreciated, went much deeper. The respect and admiration shown by William Hepworth Dixon, who celebrated the North’s victory as a high point in human history, toward the noble figure cut by the South in defeat is a case in point. No Southerner could have summarized the attractions of the Lost Cause with greater sympathy:
Men who can perish gloriously for their faith—however false that faith may be—will always seize the imagination, hold the affections, of a gallant race. Fighting for a weak and failing cause, these planters of Virginia, of Alabama, of Mississippi, rode into battle as they would have hurried to a feast; and many a man who wished them no profit in their raid and fray, could not help riding, as it were, in line with their foaming front, dashing with them into action, following their fiery course, with a flashing eye and a bounding pulse. Courage is electric. You caught the light from Jackson’s sword, you flushed and panted after [Jeb] Stuart’s plume. Their sin was not more striking than their valor. Loyal to their false gods, to their obsolete creed, they proved their personal honor by their deeds.63
The Scapegoat and the Saint
The simplest and most common means of national self-purification after defeat is to blame the old regime, exiling it to the figurative desert to wander as a forlorn outcast. If the scapegoating is not restricted to a leadership elite but encompasses a whole segment of the population, civil discord may follow, as it did in Germany after World War I. By contrast, the Lost Cause required few scapegoats, proof that, at least in this regard, the postbellum South was a relatively stable society. Although at war’s end many Southerners blamed the Confederate leadership for their defeat, the victors’ behavior gave rise to an increasing solidarity among the defeated. Before the Civil War, slavery had united the South and suppressed all dissent (or forced the dissenters to emigrate). After the war, it was the Lost Cause that answered the need for a common front against the victors during Reconstruction. Pledging fidelity to the Lost Cause—the South’s new “peculiar institution”—was a surefire way of demonstrating membership in the community. Criticizing that community, on the other hand, automatically attracted all the rage directed at scapegoats.
During the Civil War, General James Longstreet was one of the Confederacy’s most popular military commanders. Together with Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, he was part of a triumvirate representing the three cardinal military virtues: strategy (Lee), boldness (Jackson), and persistence (Longstreet).64 At no point in the war did Longstreet come in for significant criticism, in contrast to Lee, under whose command Longstreet had served at the battle of Gettysburg and who was generally held responsible for the Confederacy’s defeat there. Things changed, however, after the war, when Longstreet supported the Union’s policies of reconstruction. The former war hero was transformed into a traitor to the Confederacy, and within a few years the historiography of the Lost Cause had succeeded in proving that the person mainly responsible for the Gettysburg fiasco was not Lee but Longstreet. The reassessment of Longstreet and Lee, which reached down to the smallest details, was one of the most impressive achievements of what has since been termed the “Lost Cause industry.” Thus, Lee’s ultimate emergence as the personification of the Lost Cause is worth scrutinizing in some depth.
What is noteworthy about Lee, according to some contemporaries, is how seldom he truly shone in battle. For Edward A. Pollard, the pre-Gettysburg Lee was “a general who had never fought a battle, who had a pious horror of guerrillas, and whose extreme tenderness of blood induced him to depend exclusively upon the resources of strategy to essay the achievement of victory without the cost of love.”65 Other commanders came far closer to the ideal of the cavalier warrior. James E. B. “Jeb” Stuart (known as the “Flower of the Cavaliers”) and Stonewall Jackson were both, in contrast to the fifty-four-year-old Lee, young men at the beginning of the Civil War—reminiscent of Achilles and Alexander. Their deaths in battle as young men should have predestined them for the role of martyrs to the Lost Cause. Instead it was Lee, a peaceable man burdened by responsibility for Gettysburg, who won the favors of history. The argument that Lee’s ascension was engineered by a pro-Lee cabal within the Lost Cause industry doesn’t explain much since, without a majority consensus, hagiography is impossible.66 Lee must have had a number of attributes that made him the ideal representative of the Lost Cause.
A hero in the strong, silent mold, Lee did not publish his war memoirs during his lifetime nor did he take part in the discussions surrounding the reasons for defeat and who deserved the blame. Whereas other former military commanders continually lost stature with their relentless self-justifications, Lee left the impression after his death in 1870 of having stood nobly above the fray. The only blot on his résumé, Gettysburg, was erased by the fact that his most persistent accuser, Longstreet, had disqualified himself with his subsequent “betrayal” of the South’s cause and henceforth would be deemed the actual culprit. In biblical terms, Longstreet was Judas to Lee’s Jesus. The obvious explanation for the choice of Lee as the incarnation of the Lost Cause is that the South was primarily honoring not the military hero but the martyr. His signing of the surrender at Appomattox was a consummate act of sacrifice, which he had undertaken as his nation’s representative: “If Christ had his Gethsemane,” historian Thomas Connelly writes, “Lee had his Appomattox.”67
It is clear, then, why the South did not choose one of its youthful fallen heroes as its primary figure for identification. The only one who could play that role was a man who had experienced the full humiliation of defeat and still maintained his dignity. Lee’s exaltation confirmed the South’s venerable sense of its spiritual and cultural superiority. Moreover the concomitant cult, with its Christ analogies, allowed the South to embark on the path to rapprochement and reintegration with the nation as a whole. To cite a single example: in the early postwar years, Lee’s support for secession was depicted as a spontaneous act of Confederate patriotism and his refusal of Lincoln’s 1861 offer to assume supreme command of the Union army was compared to the temptation of Christ by Satan.68 By the 1890s, however, his decision against the Union and for the South was depicted as the outcome of a painful process of soul-searching. The new Lee was no longer a fervent Southern patriot but rather, in his heart, a Union supporter who had decided, contrary to his own inclinations and common sense, to support his homeland’s cause for reasons of loyalty and honor, although he knew from the start the quest was hopeless.69 The myth of General Lee was thus the ultimate expression both of the Lost Cause and of the path back into the Union. It transformed the lost war into martyrdom, secession into tragedy, and national reunification into catharsis.
The Religion of the Lost Cause
Religions tend to see war as a battle between good and evil, with the enemy as the spawn of Satan and their own cause as that of God Almighty. The churches involved in the Civil War were no exception. Most, in fact, had taken sides long before war was declared. The three main Protestant churches in the antebellum South—the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Baptists—all seceded from the North in the 1840s, twenty years before the political institutions of the Confederacy did so, and remained separate long after national unity had been reestablished. (The Northern and Southern Methodist churches were reunited in 1939, their Presbyterian equivalents only in 1983. The Southern and Northern Baptist churches remain separate to this day.)70
In the prewar period, Southern churches had concentrated on justifying slavery as a God-given institution legitimated by the Bible, and during the war itself, they had functioned, in the words of one historian, as one of “the most effective morale-building agencies” of the Confederacy. After Appomattox, they discovered a new theater of activities in the “cold war” between the North and the Reconstruction South. Northern religious leaders took considerable pleasure in reciting to the South its litany of sins, encouraging it to repent and sending missionaries across the Mason-Dixon Line. In response, the three main Southern churches did everything in their power to repel these spiritual advances, casting themselves as the last defenders of the Southern soul in the face of persistent Northern efforts to corrupt it. Their role was comparable to that of the Catholic Church in Moorish Spain and Russian Poland or of the Orthodox Church in Ottoman Greece and Serbia. Nations that lose their state often take refuge in their church, with the result that nationalism and religion, secular and theological thought coalesce and become indistinguishable. In this vein, the South has been described as a “sacred society” and the Lost Cause as its “civic religion.”71
The church’s first and most important contribution to the Lost Cause was to explain the South’s defeat. Its explanation included a comparison to the trials of Job, a perennial favorite among vanquished nations, according to which defeat and suffering are not evidence of abandonment by God but rather a sign of his special love. Theologians took to quoting Hebrews: “My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him: For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth” (12:5–6). If defeat was a sign of God’s love, then the reverse also held true and the enemy’s victory was a triumph for Satan. The aphorism “truth on the scaffold and wrong on the throne” echoed the secular concept of the “better men” who contrary to all reason were bested by the inferior masses.72 Consolation could be derived from the idea that, as the example of Christ showed, defeat did not destroy but rather exalted the spirit. “His enemies could nail Christ to the cross,” one preacher sermonized in 1897, “but they could not quench the ideals he embodied. His seemed to be a lost cause as the darkness fell on the great tragedy at Calvary, but out of what seemed Golgotha’s irretrievable defeat has come the cause whose mission it is to save that which is lost.”73
From Lost Cause to New Cause
Losers who have completed the first stage of reaction to defeat—surprise, dismay, disbelief, and the search for scapegoats—begin to examine their history for the deeper reasons behind their failure. Forced to admit that they took a wrong turn somewhere, they try to ascertain where they strayed from the true path. And this requires them to specify what was and is the proper destiny of their nation.
The South was not prepared to repent for the sin of slavery, as the North demanded. It was, however, willing to see slavery as a fateful misadventure. In so doing, Southerners took the new view that slavery, with its “narcotic influence” on the social body, had had equally deleterious effects on both masters and slaves that had hindered development and progress.74 “The negro was a slave to [the master], and he was a slave to the situation,” wrote one contemporary observer.
He could not abandon it without disastrous results to himself, to the negro, to the state and the world. If ever man were impelled by an irresistible force, it was the Southern white man. What did it matter to him if the earth beneath his feet was loaded with all the minerals which contribute to the wealth, convenience or enjoyment of mankind, or that the stream running by his door had waterpower enough to turn a thousand wheels? He could not utilize them; he was bound hand and foot—bound to his slaves, bound to his plantation, bound to cotton, to his habits of life, to the exigencies of the situation.75
Speculation that the history of the South might have taken a different course if only the harmful effects of slavery had been recognized earlier inevitably led back to Thomas Jefferson and the period around 1800. At that time, the yeoman farmer was the ideal type for the entire nation, including the South. Seen from this vantage point, the South’s going astray began with the onset of the cotton boom. Instead of slavery gradually dying out, as Jefferson and others had expected and hoped, it experienced a fateful upswing. Seduced by the gigantic profits promised by King Cotton, the South deviated from the correct path of yeomanry and set off on the treacherous road of a monoculture of cotton, the plantation system, and slavery. Such were the conclusions of the self-criticism undertaken after the collapse of the Confederacy. Having now been freed from the shackles of slavery, the South could begin anew at precisely that point where its proper development had broken off fifty years previously. Of course, no one seriously suggested a return to the conditions of the yeoman culture of 1800. Instead, the program for the future focused on the need for diversification rather than a single-crop economy, and that entailed industrialization.
The ideas and projects promising success after defeat are never really new; instead they merely recast prewar visions in a new light. The Southern concepts of diversification and industrialization were no exception to this rule. A minority of political economists had been trying since the 1840s to convince the public that, with its monolithic dependence on cotton, the South was in danger of becoming a colony of the North. “We purchase all our luxuries and necessaries from the North,” wrote one antebellum journalist from Alabama. “Our slaves are clothed with Northern manufactured goods (and) work with Northern hoes, ploughs, and other implements.… The slaveholder dresses in Northern goods, rides in a Northern saddle … [and] reads Northern books.… In Northern vessels his products are carried to market … and on Northern-made paper, with a Northern pen, with Northern ink, he resolves and re-resolves in regard to his rights.”76 James D. B. DeBow, whose Commercial Review of the South and West was the main mouthpiece for the critical minority, compared the South’s dependence on the North to that of Ireland on England. “Action! ACTION!! ACTION!!!” he demanded, “not in the rhetoric of Congress, but in the busy hum of mechanism, and in the thrifty operations of the hammer and anvil.”77
His calls to action, however, remained precisely that—rhetoric. Even in the sector of the Southern economy that seemed to lend itself most naturally to industrialization—the production of cotton textiles—no progress was made. At the beginning of the Civil War, 90 percent of all textile mills were located in the North. Given the great profits to be made from raw cotton, the impetus to industrialize and diversify was as slight for the nineteenth-century plantation owner as it is for the present-day oil sheiks of the Persian Gulf. Along with cotton’s enormous profitability, anti-industrial prejudice, (the other face of the South’s agrarian ideal) convinced those below the Mason-Dixon Line of their superiority to the North. Thus, DeBow’s Cassandra-like warnings went unheeded, and the advocates of the one-crop economy with their hymns to cotton always had the last word. “Our Cotton is the most wonderful talisman. By its power we are transmuting whatever we choose into whatever we want,” explained one cotton farmer, while James Henry Hammond opined in the Senate three years before the Civil War: “The slaveholding South is now the controlling power of the world.… No power on earth dares … to make war on cotton. Cotton is king.”78
The Confederacy’s defeat and the abolition of slavery finally seemed to create a situation in which industrialization could take off. DeBow energetically resumed his efforts where he had been forced to break them off in 1861, and others followed his lead. Daniel Harvey Hill, for example, devoted his periodical The Land We Love to reviving the old planks in the modernizers’ platform: industrialization, diversification, expansion of the transportation network, and exploitation of natural resources. In addition, there was a new demand that no one before the war had dared to articulate explicitly. The aristocratic spirit of the “Old South”—the appellation caught on almost immediately after the Confederacy’s defeat—had outlived its time, and a fundamental reorientation around mercantile pragmatism was required. Physical labor, which like almost every other kind of practical skill was beneath the dignity of the cavalier gentleman in the Old South, could no longer be denigrated or accepted only reluctantly; it had to be promoted as a virtue. The transition was not an easy one, as Hill, a former general, pointed out in the first issue of his newspaper, but there was no alternative:
The pride which we might have felt in the glories of the past is rebuked by the thought that these glories have faded away. It is rebuked by the thought that they were purchased at the expense of the material prosperity of the country; for men of wealth and talents did not combine their fortunes, their energies, and their intellects to develop the immense resources of the land of their nativity. What factories did they erect? What mines did they dig? What foundries did they establish? What machine-shops did they build? What ships did they put afloat? Their minds and their hearts were engrossed in the struggle for national position and national honors. The yearning desire was ever for political supremacy, and never for domestic thrift and economy.… The old method of instruction was never wise; it is no worse than folly.… Is not a practical acquaintance with the ax, the plane, the saw, the anvil, the loom, the plow and the mattock, vastly more useful to an impoverished people than familiarity with the laws of nations and the science of government?… God is now honoring manual labor with us as he has never done before with any other nation. It is the high-born, the cultivated, the intelligent, the brave, the generous, who are now constrained to work with their own hands. Labor is thus associated in our mind with all that is honorable in birth, refined in manners, bright in intellect, manly in character and magnanimous in soul.79
The willingness to effect a fundamental reorientation, as proclaimed after 1865 by men like DeBow and Hill, did not last long. DeBow died in 1867. His periodical was continued for a year by his employees, then was sold, only to cease publication the following year. Hill continued publishing The Land We Love until 1869, before likewise throwing in the towel. He had already given up his program of radical cultural reorientation. The failure of this initiative, which had begun with such great conviction, raises the possibility that the South’s brief infatuation with industrial capitalism had been nothing more than a “dreamland” episode, so common in cultures of defeat.
The Cold War of Reconstruction
When DeBow and Hill began publishing, they assumed that the only price the South would have to pay for its defeat would be the abolition of slavery and the renunciation of its claims to independence. Everything else, they believed, would be restored to its former place and the prodigal son would return home. This was how the South in general envisioned the aftermath of the war. As foreign observers noted, the word union became a kind of magic formula in the South during the months immediately following Appomattox: “a word of grace,” wrote William Hepworth Dixon, “of sweetness, and of charm.… Disunion, a word so musical not thirty months ago, is now a ban, a stigma, a reproach.” Dixon summarized the prevailing Southern sentiment in the summer of 1865: “We are all for the Union. The Union as it was, if we may have it so; our sole desire is to stand where we stood in ’61.”80
The assumption that, with the exception of slavery, everything would go back to the status quo ante also conformed to the policy officially pursued by Abraham Lincoln and, after Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson. Both men had understood the primary purpose of the Civil War to be not the abolition of slavery but the preservation of national unity. Historian Kenneth Stampp says of Lincoln’s interest in emancipation that “rarely has a man embraced his destiny with greater reluctance than he,” but Johnson clearly went him one better: “I wish to God every head of a family in the United States had one slave to take the drudgery and menial service off the family.”81 Even after emancipation, neither Lincoln nor Johnson considered making the ex-slaves full citizens of the United States. Their plans, insofar as they were formulated, vacillated between deportation to Africa and a status that in the twentieth century became known as “stateless.”82 Far from being extreme, such opinions reflected prevailing sentiments throughout the North. As C. Vann Woodward notes, blacks only had the right to vote in five Northern and Midwestern states as of 1860, and as late as 1869, the New York state legislature voted down a proposed law that would have enfranchised them. It is one of the great ironies of the American antislavery movement that many of its most committed supporters were also opponents of legal equality for ex-slaves, indeed, dedicated racists.83
As for the reintegration of the South into the Union, Lincoln’s and Johnson’s plans fit nicely with the expectations of the losing side. The prevailing spirit was one of moderation and reconciliation. Only the most recalcitrant rebels were to be excluded from the common project of national rebuilding, while moderates on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line would work side by side, like the Founding Fathers, to patch the nation back together. Since the expectations of the victors and the vanquished seemed nearly identical, the chance for a harmonious peace appeared great in the spring of 1865. But neither Lincoln nor Johnson took account of the hate and hysteria that four years of war had unleashed on both sides, and they failed to realize that such passions could not be eradicated with the stroke of a pen. Historians still speculate whether Lincoln, in contrast to the politically weak Johnson, could have used his authority to achieve his aims. In the days before Lincoln’s assassination in April, however, Northern editorialists were already raising doubts that he was the right man to deal with the “cancer of wickedness” in the South, warning that more “misjudged leniency” would be unacceptable. Ralph Waldo Emerson clearly articulated this view in his diary a few days after the assassination: “The heroic deliverer could no longer serve us,… the rebellion touched its natural conclusion, and what remained to be done required new and uncommitted hands.”84
The fact that the Union’s leaders favored reconciliation while the public passionately thirsted for revenge and punishment seemed at first to open some room for Southern political maneuvering.85 The mood was liable to alter at any time, however, and in short order the South began to overreach. Southern politicians relied too much on Johnson and did not give sufficient consideration to the power of public opinion in the North. In the six months following Lee’s surrender, the South restored its political institutions so thoroughly that it gave the impression of believing that Appomattox, the secession, and the Civil War had never happened. And all of this transpired without the symbolic acts of penitence and subjugation that the North surely expected. The final straw came with the institution of the “black codes.”86 Enacted in late 1865 by the reconstituted state legislatures, the codes amounted to a de facto reversal of emancipation, restricting freedom of movement for ex-slaves and adopting a number of measures that served to retie them to their former masters.
As a result, over the next two years the promise of reconciliation began to unravel. In 1866, radical Republicans in Congress seized control of Reconstruction from the moderate “presidential Reconstructionists.” Two years later, Johnson was impeached, while Congress took over numerous executive powers and refused to acknowledge the elected representatives from the South. Moreover, the state legislatures and governments that had been reconstituted under Johnson were dissolved, and the entire South was subjected to military occupation. Divided up into five military zones whose commanders possessed dictatorial powers, the South was transformed into occupied enemy territory. Reconstruction no longer sought to revive the South’s prewar ideas and traditions but instead became synonymous with a complete overhaul and revision according to the alien conceptions of the North. The granting of civil liberties by Congress to the former slaves was considered the most hostile of the enemy actions—and not without some justification, considering the North’s previous ambivalence on this question. Again accusing the North of hypocrisy, the South charged the Yankees with treating blacks like pawns in a game whose sole aim was to humiliate the South.
It is no surprise, then, that the program of renewal and modernization put forward after Lee’s surrender by DeBow and Hill died such a quick death. The policy of moderate presidential Reconstruction lasted almost two years, longer than the typical dreamland period, but it was a dreamland all the same. In the cold war of congressional Reconstruction that followed, appeals for modernization and industrialization programs garnered little public support, based as they were on the Northern model. It was as impossible for the South, in the throes of reacting to perceived Northern betrayal, to embrace an industrial Northern reorientation as it would have been for the United States as a whole to adopt a program of socialism during the McCarthy era. For the duration of congressional Reconstruction, the South circled its wagons, as it had in the decades preceding the Civil War. The Lost Cause ceased to be a peaceable feeling of nostalgia and became the ideology of white supremacy, indeed an instrument of repression. The private militias that started to form in 1867, among them the Ku Klux Klan, were essentially the violent arm of this movement. These groups saw themselves not as lynch mobs but as the descendants of Robin Hood and the Scottish clans and as defenders of the chivalric ideal. A passage from the Ku Klux Klan’s charter reads: “This is an institution of Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy, and Patriotism, embodying in its genius and its principles all that is chivalric in conduct, noble in sentiment, generous in manhood, and patriotic in purpose.”87
The cold war of Reconstruction went on for ten years. It ended not with victory by either side but with a compromise, or more accurately, a recognition that both sides actually shared the same aims. (The radical Republican ideologues in Congress, who had been the driving force behind this cold war, may ultimately have been its biggest losers since the Republican Party eventually lost its congressional majority.) The North of 1877 was no longer the North of 1867. The Gilded Age had begun, and the accumulation and enjoyment of wealth had replaced moralizing as the order of the day. In shocked reaction to the Paris Commune in 1871, the spirit of the age had turned conservative, and since the South had always been considered a bastion of conservatism, there was no longer any need to cordon it off. On the contrary, in the fight against social disorder and radicalism of every sort, the South was seen as a welcome ally. In 1877, Congress declared its mission in the South to have been achieved, and the last of the occupying troops and the accompanying political and administrative bureaucracy were withdrawn. The old Southern elites returned to their positions of power. The North’s about-face was greeted in the South as the start of its own redemption. The political conditions that had prevailed before congressional Reconstruction were restored, although former slaves retained their constitutional rights, which could not be officially revoked. They could, however, be skirted with the methods of manipulation and repression that had been perfected since the end of the war. The result by the end of the century was a new set of black codes, imposed with the North’s tacit blessing.
In 1877, the South found itself in a situation comparable to that of France in 1879 and Germany in 1924. After years of external cold war and internal instability, of crisis and the search for a new consensus, things had begun to settle down. This new phase signaled the actual end of the war and the beginning of a new era in Southern history.
The Idea of the New South
Reformers who fail to achieve their goals the first time around because the world is not yet ready for them are usually shunted off the stage of history. This fate befell DeBow and Hill not once but twice. Their second attempt to spread the gospel of Southern industrialization would most likely have foundered in any case given the unfavorable political climate, but it is also true that prophets, having predicted a catastrophe, are rarely rewarded afterward for their prescience. And ultimately DeBow and Hill were unable to coin a slogan that would move and excite their audience. No matter how eloquently and thoughtfully they articulated their ideas about renewing the South, they never hit on the seemingly simple formulation “New South.” The reason was probably reluctance rather than lack of imagination. For prior to 1880, when the term acquired a near-universal resonance, “New South” had predominantly negative connotations below the Mason-Dixon Line. In the first year of the Civil War, the Union military administration that occupied the Sea Islands, off the coast of South Carolina, published a newspaper called the New South. As might be expected, the periodical found little favor with the native white population. With what one historian calls its “peremptory, hostile tone,” it read like a broadside for the congressional Reconstruction to come.88 There may have been other propagandistic uses of the term, and if so, that would explain why loyal Southerners did not take up what would have been seen as a Yankee idea. This is pure speculation, but another episode in the history of the New South sheds additional light on the problematic origins of the term.
In 1870, not long after the demise of DeBows’s and Hill’s publications and a full decade before the term New South came into general usage, an article was published bearing the title “The New South: What It Is Doing, and What It Wants.” Its author, Edwin DeLeon, an ex-diplomat, was of the same generation as DeBow and Hill but had not weighed in on the questions of modernization and industrialization in the South before the war. This program was the same as DeBow’s and Hill’s; his rhetoric, however, was markedly different. Instead of criticizing the Old South and demanding reform, DeLeon painted a picture of a region already in the full swing of modernization, one “whose wants and wishes, ends and aims, plans and purposes, are as different from those of 1860, as though a century instead of a decade only divided the two.”89 Along with the rhetoric, there was another important difference. DeBow and Hill had published their articles in their own periodicals, which, having been written, edited, printed, and distributed in the South, were considered the mouthpieces of traditional separatism. DeLeon’s article on the New South, by contrast, appeared in Putnam’s Magazine, one of the largest Northern periodicals. It was therefore primarily addressing a Northern audience, which may account for DeLeon’s demonstrative use of the term New South. The fact that the phrase does not occur in any of the articles on the topic that he published in the South would seem to argue for this hypothesis.90 Edward A. Pollard, the advocate of the Lost Cause, also tailored his message to his audience. Two years after calling on the South to defend its traditions, he metamorphosed into a propagandist for a New South, albeit without calling it such. Significantly, however, he took care not to publish his reformist articles south of the Mason-Dixon Line, confining them to magazines that appeared in New York and Philadelphia.91
These men were transitional figures, forerunners and prophets who either found no honor in their own country (DeBow and Hill) or sought their audience elsewhere (DeLeon and Pollard). The change in political climate that accompanied the end of congressional Reconstruction in 1877 made the journalistic detour north unnecessary and for the first time attracted Southern interest in the New South. Astonishingly, portions of the North had been receptive to the New South program even while the punitive policies of Reconstruction were proceeding full steam ahead. These Northerners probably saw the South as part good and part evil—a division common in the propaganda techniques of the twentieth century, which typically designate the “good” half of the enemy nation as the “other” (as in “the other Germany” of World War II) and regard it as a potential ally. The tendency of the early New South propagandists to use the North as a model certainly made them ideal representatives of the “other” South in Northern eyes. In the end, these few, isolated voices sufficed to give the North a sense that its efforts had not been in vain and that the seeds sown during Reconstruction were now taking root.
It was largely thanks to the efforts of the generation of public figures who took the stage after 1880 that the slogan and vision of the New South was established in the South itself. Born in the 1850s, these men had no personal memories of the prewar secession movement and only childhood recollections of the war itself. Growing up during Reconstruction, they observed firsthand the omnipotence of the North. The conclusion they drew could not have been clearer. The return to the Union was not a defeat but a chance to rejoin the victorious nation. “The greatest blessing that ever befell us was the failure to establish a nationality,” wrote journalist Robert Bingham.92 Another member of the generation, Woodrow Wilson, used similar words: “Because I love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy.… The perpetuation of slavery would, beyond all question, have wrecked our agricultural and commercial interests.”93 What allowed the young men of the 1880s to renounce the positions of their fathers so easily was precisely the fact that the positions were their fathers’. To distance oneself from one’s father is often to affiliate oneself with one’s grandfather, in this instance with the generation that had steered the course of the nation before it had split apart and that therefore could provide a model for the task of reunification. Thus, most post-Reconstruction Southern leaders went about their business not as political economists (like DeBow) or economic journalists but as descendants of the great statesmen-orators of the Old South. Their role was not to disseminate specialist knowledge but to sketch out the general direction of the economy and propose areas for expansion. Rhetoric played a central role. Just as the grandfathers had accomplished great political deeds with their oratorical skills, so the grandsons set out to achieve great economic results with theirs.94
In their view, the New South was less a distant goal than a more or less finished project. This conceit was hardly new; DeLeon and Pollard had advanced it earlier. But whereas those two men tempered their proposals with self-criticism, self-doubt, and a demand for public reeducation, the New South generation portrayed itself and the region as at the height of their powers. “In all lines of industry the advance is steady and continuous,” editorialized the Manufacturers Record, a Southern economic magazine. “The old agricultural South has ceased to be.… From henceforth the South stands in the front rank … as the exponent of American progress.… It is in truth not ‘the coming’ but the existing ‘El Dorado of American Adventure.’”95 Nonetheless, for all the bluster, an uncertain, contrived tone seemed to underlie the optimism. The most prominent propagandist of the New South generation, Henry W. Grady, for instance, assured his readers: “We have sowed towns and cities in the place of theories and put business above politics. We have fallen in love with work.”96 Or, as the Manufacturers Record proudly announced, Virginia was no longer “the mother of presidents” but “the mother of millionaires.” The South, it said, “has learned that ‘time is money.’” The lead article in a Richmond newspaper declared: “The almighty dollar is fast becoming a power here, and he who commands the most money holds the strongest hand. We no longer condemn the filthy lucre.”97
The New South promoters were less at ease, however, when they were pledging their loyalty to mercantile materialism than when they were boasting about the advantages of their homeland. These advantages were twofold: an inexhaustible supply of raw materials and a temperate climate. In addition to reaping its traditional agricultural bounty, the New South aimed to begin exploiting its abundant natural resources, which had been scandalously neglected by the plantation system. And the North could not hope to compete with the South’s mild weather. “Why,” Grady asked rhetorically, “remain to freeze, and starve, and struggle on the bleak prairies of the northwest when the garden spot of the world is waiting for people to take possession of it and enjoy it?”98 No Northern capitalist or European immigrant, it was thought, could possibly resist the double lure of resources and climate. They would be drawn to the South as inevitably as bees to the flower. “The certain and steady shifting of the greatest industrial centers of the country from the North to the more favoured regions of the South,” Grady wrote, would transform the South into the nation’s wealthiest region.99 “The Eldorado of the next half century is the South,” Richard H. Edmonds, publisher of the Manufacturers Record, prophesied.100 Such gestures of reconciliation scarcely concealed the fantasy of revanche that would turn the lost military war into a postwar economic victory. The image Grady chose to express that sentiment comes close to a Freudian slip: “From Virginia to Texas the woods are full of New England capitalists hunting investments, and you can hardly fire a gun without killing one.”101
Revanche was only one subtext in the New South’s vision of its attractiveness to the North. It is not hard to see in the South’s depiction of itself as “mild,” “charming,” and “lush” the desire of the woman to be courted by the man. The North as the man of action, the South as the passionately courted belle—it was a pairing that conformed to the traditional gendering of the two regions in American mythology.102 The most prominent mythological element in the self-conception of the industrial New South, however, was the old idea of paradise on earth. Already apparent in the South’s praise for its mild climate, charming landscape, and inexhaustible natural resources, this idea was now extended into the unlikely realm of industrialization. Industry was depicted in words that evoked the plantation system, which had been described as a bucolic Arcadia and Garden of Eden. The South was not a gloomy manufacturing landscape like the Northern “wilderness” but rather, as Grady boasted, an industrial paradise, “resting in Divine assurance, within touch of field and mine and forest—not set amid costly farms from which competition has driven the farmer in despair, but amid cheap and sunny lands, rich with agriculture, to which neither season nor soil has set a limit—this system of industries is mounting to a splendor that shall dazzle and illuminate the world.”103 In contrast to the myth of the plantation, which had a powerful economy backing it up, this industrial Arcadia was almost entirely unreal, brought to life by nothing but the words of the propagandists of the 1880s.
* * *
FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER the end of the war, the impression made by the South on most foreign visitors was one of hopeless devastation. C. Vann Woodward’s synopsis of contemporary travel reports runs as follows:
Throughout the countryside and in the small towns travelers found the same grim poverty and dilapidation. Roads were in a “shocking condition,” with “few bridges across the rivers, and almost none across the creeks.” Railroads, “save for a few through lines operated by Northern capitalists,” were “barely passable for trains running ten or fifteen miles an hour.” In Alabama “the towns are lonesome and the stores empty of customers; hotels subsist on the patronage of drummers from Northern cities.” Planters’ homes were often abandoned and falling in ruins, and Negroes “live in the old cabins … or have built for themselves wretched huts.” The picture was much the same in other states. “Everywhere the people show by their dress and manner of living that they are poor. Even the owners of large plantations wear coarse clothing, live on plainer fare than ordinary mechanics in the North, and are oppressed with debts.”104
While the textile industry, a pet project of New South propaganda, began to gain a foothold in the 1880s, it was restricted to isolated regions. The total picture remained that of a “miserable landscape dotted only with a few rich enclaves.”105 Although absolute statistics showed the South making progress in industrialization, relative to the North, it was actually moving backward. Whereas in 1860 17.2 percent of national industrial production and 11.5 percent of national industrial capital came from the South, by 1904 the respective figures had declined to 15.3 and 11 percent. The discrepancy in standard of living was similar. Per capita income in the 1880s South was only a third of the national average.106 Expectations of a wave of European immigrants who would provide a reservoir of cheap labor and so attract capital investments to the South also remained unfulfilled. New Jersey alone received twice the number of immigrants as the entire South during this period. Of the 250,000 immigrants who entered the United States in the two years following the war, a grand total of 3,000 settled in the South. And even then, not all remained. For example, a group of 213 settlers who had been recruited in the fall of 1865 for a plantation in Louisiana were clearly not happy there. “When the immigrants saw the dilapidated slave shacks and tasted the fatback and cornbread,” one historian records, “they sat down and refused to work.”107
The only economic reality to emerge at the end of the South’s industrial apotheosis was that of an economic colony. In contrast to Henry Grady’s surreal image of Northern capitalists wandering about the Southern forests like herds of deer, the South itself became the hunted game. Contrary to the expectation that Northern capital would flow into the South like a stream of milk and honey, the North withdrew capital gains as quickly as they were earned. Instead of becoming a new version of the North, much less achieving economic mastery, the South became the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Third World, condemned to the role of providing low-wage, low-tech labor and more controlled by and dependent on the North than ever before.108
Seldom in the history of economic modernization has the self-conception of a modernizing elite been so at odds with reality as in the New South. To some extent, the deafening proclamations of New South propagandists were an attempt to drown out the growing feelings of inferiority. Like other vanquished societies, the New South hoped to modernize by imitating the superior technological model of its former enemy—but preserving its cultural identity in the process and even establishing its superiority to that of the “uncultured” victors. Seen from this perspective, the New South program emerges as nothing other than the Lost Cause in modern dress or, conversely, a return to the Old South via the detour of modernization. The New South was “simply the Old South under new conditions,” according to one version, or “the Old South asserting herself under a new dispensation,” in another. In either case its mission was to “take up the unfinished work of the Old South so rudely interrupted by the shock of war.”109
With these slogans, New South propagandists defended their program against attacks by traditional Lost Cause advocates, who accused them of selling out traditional values. It was the time-honored conflict between orthodox conservatives and those open to reconciliation and modernization—in the vernacular of the time, between the “mummies” of the Lost Cause and the “new men” who were seeking to preserve the Old South in the New.110 Their contradictory aspirations suggest why the lush rhetoric of the New South was so radically divorced from its impoverished reality. The greatest obstacle to an economic boom turned out to be what has been described as a continuation of slavery by other means: the policies of racism, segregation, repression, and discrimination that continued well into the twentieth century. These policies were as integral a part of the New South program as the ideas of modernization and industrialization. Moreover, in contrast to such rhetorical chimeras, racist policies were a reality that scuttled all plans before they had a chance to succeed.
The New South thus reveals an astonishing affinity to that of the Old South. Just as the peculiar institution of slavery had driven the Old South into isolation, the no less peculiar institution of racial discrimination condemned the New South’s modernization attempts to failure. Nonetheless, the similarity conceals a more significant difference between the two societies. The prewar cotton barons were, within the context of slavery, highly modern agricultural industrialists who could measure up to the captains of industry in the North. The fact that they named their plantations after Walter Scott’s heroes and took part in pseudomedieval tournaments in no way inhibited their ability to conduct business transactions. They knew how to keep the two worlds apart. Their sons, the New South propagandists, did not possess this ability. They were caught in a dilemma: slavery no longer being an option, they were able to accept and embrace liberal-industrial capitalism—with its egalitarian implications—only in rhetoric. Their position in a no-man’s-land between Northern industrial capitalism and Prussian-style romantic-agrarian patriarchy prevented them from consistently pursuing either system. As a result, they hopelessly romanticized both the Old South that they were trying to restore and the industrial modernization that was to serve as the primary means to that end.
The Embrace
“It is with no ordinary pride and satisfaction that we thus record the completion of the task undertaken with the desire to enlighten our country concerning itself, and to spread before the nation the wonderful natural resources, the social condition, and the political complications of a region which needs but just, wise, and generous legislation, with responding good will and industry, to make it a garden of happiness and prosperity.”111
These lines, written in 1874, flowed from the pen not of one of the New South propagandists but of the editor of Scribner’s Magazine, which was based in New York. The occasion was a series of articles by Scribner’s star reporter, Edward King, about conditions in the South during congressional Reconstruction. King had made his name a few years previously with his reports on the Paris Commune. Now he became the first Northern reporter to sketch out a new picture of the South, no longer depicting it as incorrigibly hostile to the Union and its values. King’s South had been reeducated by its defeat and postwar sufferings, and its population was “as loyal to the idea of the Union today as are the citizens of New York.”112
King was not alone in his depiction. Over the course of the next two years, during which many similar articles appeared, the North underwent a change of heart regarding the South. The policy of a strong punitive hand came to seem outmoded and obsolete: “Is it not time,” one editorial asked, “to bring to an end the punishment of the innocent many for the crimes of the guilty few?” The commercial and conservative zeitgeist of the 1870s, rejecting the moralizing stance of congressional Reconstruction, was increasingly sympathetic to Southern viewpoints, particularly on the issue of white supremacy as the only means to prevent a feared “Africanization” of the country. It was the beginning of a national embrace, and the young men of the New South were the ideal figures to reach out to their former enemies. Too young to have been accessories to the crimes of slavery and secession, they were doubly likely to elicit warm feelings because they were admirers of the Northern model and because they gave their counterparts the sense of having won over the sons after defeating the fathers. The North proved all too eager to share in the fantasy of the New South’s blossoming industrial landscapes. As a New York banker wrote of his journeys there: “It seemed to me that we traveled through a continuous and unbroken strain of what has been aptly termed the music of progress—the whir of the spindle, the buzz of the saw, the roar of the furnace, and the throb of the locomotive.”113
Insofar as the former enemies were not sovereign states but two sides in a civil war, the postwar history of the South was destined to be one of reunification and reconciliation with the North. In this respect, the War of Secession (as the Civil War was also known) is comparable to the nineteenth-century European wars of national unification in Italy and Germany, which also feature a modern North (Piedmont and Prussia) compelling a traditionalist South (Naples and Austria) into a joint venture. The similarities do not stop there. In all three cases, the national unity that had been wrought by the sword was perceived to be complete only when the two sides joined to fight against a common external enemy. What the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 was for Germany and the 1911 Libyan war against the Ottoman Empire was for Italy, the Spanish-American War of 1898 was for the United States: an ordeal of fire that brought the nation together. It must be said that the Spanish-American War could only partially fulfill this function: the conflict did not last long enough to give rise to a mythology of sufficient depth. It was too short and too slight to qualify as a crusade; it lacked the gravity to take the mythological place occupied by the Civil War. Only World War I was able to accomplish that task, and then all the more thoroughly.
The First World War offered both sides in the Civil War the opportunity once and for all to transfer any lingering resentments to a common enemy. A comparison of the propaganda used during both conflicts reveals a similar psychology of demonizing the enemy, down to the very choice of words. Germany became what the North and the South had been for each other: the incarnation of evil. For the North, which considered itself the moral victor in both wars, the transference was easier than for the South, which had to grow accustomed to its new role. Nonetheless, thirty years of New South ideology had created enough identification with the former conqueror for the South to join the chorus calling for a crusade with full conviction, using much the same rhetoric as had been directed against it and its peculiar institution a half century earlier. To cite two examples, Randolph McKim, in his sermon “America Summoned to a Holy War,” declared that Germany “must be beaten to its knees; it must be crushed, if civilization is to be saved—if the world is to be made safe for Democracy.… This conflict is indeed a Crusade. The greatest in history—the holiest. It is in the profoundest and truest sense a Holy War.” And the Baptist Standard in April 1917 insisted: “This is not a war of conquest or of retaliation. It is a conflict between liberty and autocracy—between democracy and monarchism, a protest against the spirit of despotism and militarism.… We hear the summons to a new crusade.”114 It is both an irony of history and a subject worthy of an extended psychohistorical study that Woodrow Wilson, the man who led the United States in its moral crusade, was the first Southern president since the days of the secession.115
So what became of the Lost Cause? Did the South’s shared victory in World War I render it obsolete? On the surface, this would appear to be the case. “Dixie’s cause triumphant is the South’s ‘lost cause’ no more,” ran a line from a poem composed to commemorate the year 1918.116 Joining the ranks of the victors fulfilled the psychological demand for revanche, even though Germany—and not the North—was now the enemy. As a balm for wounded pride, the Lost Cause had fulfilled its mission by 1918 and might have been expected to disappear. But in the fifty years of its existence, the myth had developed a momentum of its own. Unlike the French desire for revanche after 1870 and Germany’s stab-in-the-back legend of 1918–19, which both lost relevance after subsequent wars, the Lost Cause remained a piece of regional mythology, available to be tapped whenever the South felt out of step with the nation as a whole. It persists in varying degrees to the present day.
Its first renaissance in the twentieth century occurred ten years after World War I, as the failure of the New South became obvious. Far from acknowledging the South as a paradigm of modernization, most Northerners looked on the region with horror, disgust, or at best disdainful amusement, seeing it as the home of racial discrimination, lynchings, creationism, and other forms of barbarism. In response, twelve young Southern writers, including Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, banded together as the “Southern agrarians” and in 1930 published a manifesto entitled I’ll Take My Stand. All twelve were rebels against their fathers’ New South generation and defenders of the South against the rest of the country. As an intellectual offensive, their writings were nothing less than a second, “spiritual” secession.117 I’ll Take My Stand offered little more than a revised version of what antebellum Southern ideologues like George Fitzhugh had written. Once again, the South was depicted as an agricultural Arcadia and contrasted with the industrial hell of the North. But the timing of the publication, a year after the beginning of the Great Depression, could not have been more felicitous. The widespread suffering of that era—and the need for an alternative—undoubtedly accounts for the serious critical attention I’ll Take My Stand attracted. Less significant was the work’s reception by economists and social scientists who, like the authors themselves, were unable to see that the book was not an economic and political manifesto but a work of literature in disguise.118
Although they did not change Southern reality, the agrarians succeeded in transforming the Lost Cause into a new myth of the “other” America. Some historians have viewed this extended Lost Cause as a challenge to American capitalism comparable in its radicalism to Marxism. David M. Potter was the first historian to draw attention to this aspect of the agrarian ideals of the 1930s. But, he argued, “the real significance lay in the fact that it offered an alternative to Marxism. Here, in fact, was a way in which a man could renounce industrial capitalism and all its works without becoming a Marxist. This is perhaps why the agrarian ideal held so much attention for such a large number of social thinkers. It gave them a chance to express their dissent from the prevailing system without going outside the American tradition in order to do so.”119 The ideological development of Eugene Genovese, a leading historian of Southern slavery, from orthodox Marxist to “Southern conservative” serves as an ex post facto illustration of Potter’s thesis. To complete the picture, one need only add what Genovese’s wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, says of today’s Southern conservatives: “They are proudly and self-consciously heir to what may well be the most sustained critique of the excesses of capitalism that this country has known.”120
The American South and the agrarian ideal of a “counter-America” offered both a criticism of the status quo and a preview of a better world. Depending on the prevailing mood, the rest of the nation has reacted to this challenge with either dreamy nostalgia or irritated hostility. For the nation as a whole, the South remains an exception usually viewed with simultaneous mistrust and nostalgia. Not coincidentally, the South in the twentieth century continued to share the German destiny of being periodically demonized by Northern moralists as the incarnation of evil.121
It may seem that we have exhausted the topic of the Lost Cause as the central myth of the South. Yet its significance for the rest of America merits a closer look. In particular, it is worth examining how Southern history made its way to the North and came to be accepted in the dual sense of “trophy taking”: as the appropriation of the vanquished culture in the form of “booty” and as the tendency of intellectual elites to see their nation’s triumph as a source of peril and to find in the loser’s culture a positive counterexample. To the unified nation, the South and its Lost Cause constituted a trophy of both sorts.
The Nationalization of the Lost Cause
The folk wisdom that the Civil War resulted from the reading habits of the American people contains a kernel of truth. Just as Mark Twain identified Walter Scott as the cause of the South’s ill-fated destiny, to this day schoolbooks contain the truism that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) so excited moral outrage in the North as to make the Civil War inevitable. Undoubtedly, Scott’s novels played a significant role in shaping the mentality of the South in the decades before the war. Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped mobilize Northern public opinion against slavery. But literature also played a role after the war, in the reconciliation between the two sections of the nation. For the “plantation novels” that became all the rage in the 1880s and 1890s presupposed readers willing to embrace the reunited nation. It is ironic, then, that the plantation novel actually arose before the Civil War, in the very decades when the South was developing its cultural identity. Indeed, second only to the Walter Scott craze, the plantation novel was the most important literary vehicle for the idea of a discrete Southern culture. Without it there would have been no plantation mythology or myth of the cavalier, and without the myth of the cavalier there would have been no belief in Southern cultural separatism. In other words, Southern culture was as bound up with the plantation and its accompanying myths as the European aristocratic culture was with images of the castle and the court. The plantation was the counterpart to the Northern office and factory, the site not of working, calculating, and doing business but of enjoying life to its fullest in complete comfort. As a locus amoenus, it approximated the paradise on earth that the South had imagined itself to be since it was first settled.
The prewar plantation novel contains several recurrent elements. At the center, there is always a big white house with a Greek portico, an open staircase, an expansive veranda, the shady trees of an adjoining park, and the enchanting scent of magnolias. In the background, there are white fields of cotton where black slaves go about their work in choreographed harmony. The planter is always a cheerful, rather impractical elderly gentleman who devotes more time to his hobbies than to everyday affairs. Strangely enough, there is seldom a lady of the house, and when there is, she is usually a “dim figure, as though matrimony faded womanhood into rapid indistinctness.”122 All the more important, then, is the role played by the daughter. She is her father’s beloved confidante and is frequently surrounded by eager young beaus. Usually she is described not as ravishingly beautiful but rather as highly attractive in her charm, wit, and grace.123 The young master is an ancillary character compared with the daughter and is included more for reasons of family symmetry—which is already disrupted by the absence of the mother—than for any compelling dramatic purpose. Among the slaves, the two most important figures are the old black butler, also a confidant of the planter, and the cheerful mammy. The rest of the slaves serve as a chorus, singing, dancing, and taking delight in life’s small things, as innocent and carefree as children. It is a world “permeated with joy from top to bottom,” much like that of the Central European operetta with its Hungarian princes and counts, servants, chambermaids, and gypsy musicians.124
In presenting readers with these idyllic visions, the prewar plantation novel merely conforms to the norm of nineteenth-century escapist literature.125 What is remarkable is that it attracted such an enthusiastic readership in the North precisely at the moment when abolitionist sentiment was at its height. Apparently the soul of the North was divided in two. While one half condemned slavery as barbarism and demanded its abolition, the other enjoyed the beautiful illusion of a plantation Arcadia, “a sort of projection ground for its own dreams of a vanished golden time.”126 The plantation novel allowed Northern readers to withdraw for a few pleasant hours from their work ethic and discipline, to lose themselves in a lavish dream world, a society they would deem immoral as soon as they finished reading. This age-old conflict between the taming of the instincts and the desire for pleasure could not always be mediated by a simple switch of mental gears, as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other, more obscure antislavery novels of the 1850s clearly demonstrate. All are plantation novels—and not just in the sense that any work about slavery is necessarily set on a plantation. More to the point, they all follow the Arcadian paradigm, contrasting it with a satanic fall from grace. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the genial but weak-willed planter is the Southerner St. Clare, whereas the evil slave master is the transplanted Yankee Legree. Historian W. R. Taylor describes the villainous Legree as an “anti-planter” and his mansion, which perverts the principles of the “good” plantation, as an “anti-home”: “What we are given in a few pages is an evocative vision of the home become a factory, where everything, finally, is weighed in the balance scale of Legree’s cotton house. Southerners, who almost universally objected to these scenes, never fully understood that Harriet Stowe had simply imported into the South the factory scenes which Southerners were fond of invoking as contrast to the paternalism of the plantation.”127 Thus, far from consistently embodying the evils of slavery, the plantation, even in abolitionist novels, continues to represent the idealized image of an intact agrarian-patriarchal society.
War and reconstruction only temporarily diminished the plantation novel’s popularity. The example of John W. DeForest, for instance, shows how vital the tradition was and how easily it could be resurrected. DeForest, a New Englander, served as an officer in the Union army and in the administration of the occupying forces. He was thus not a man who could be accused of political sympathies with the South. In 1867, however, he published what was probably the first postwar plantation novel to be penned by a Northerner. Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty was written very much in the spirit of Reconstruction, “not unkind to the South in detail,” as Paul H. Buck writes, but “altogether a triumph of Yankee virtue over Rebel frailty.”128 Having made his point, DeForest moved closer in his later novels to the prewar literary convention of the idyllic plantation. The shift can hardly be explained by opportunism since at this point there was little market in the North for plantation romanticism. What attracted DeForest, aside from nostalgic longings, was the picturesque quality of plantation life and the colorful cast of characters, both of which stood in stark contrast to the gray conformity of life in the North. He made this clear, not without an undertone of condescension, in a 1869 essay: “They [Southerners] are more simple than we, more provincial, more antique, more picturesque; they have fewer of the virtues of modern society, and more of the primitive, the natural virtues; they care less for wealth, art, learning, and the other delicacies of an urban civilization.… Cowed as we are by the Mrs. Grundy of democracy; moulded into tame similarity by a general education, remarkably uniform in degree and nature, we shall do well to study this peculiar people, which will soon lose its peculiarities; we shall do better to engraft upon ourselves its nobler qualities.”129 In the 1860s Albion W. Tourgée, another former Union army officer and occupation administrator who tried his hand at literature, foresaw a shift that would further enhance the plantation legend in the post-Reconstruction era. “Within thirty years after the war of rebellion,” he wrote, “popular sympathy will be with those who upheld the Confederate cause rather than with those by whom it was overthrown; our popular heroes will be Confederate leaders; our fiction will be Southern in its prevailing types and distinctly Southern in its character.”130
It was no accident that plantation romanticism became a national literary fashion at precisely the same time that the propaganda for the New South was being warmly received in both the South and the North. Nor was it mere coincidence that the authors of these novels, like the propagandists of the New South, were nearly all born in the 1850s. (At least one figure, Joel Chandler Harris, was a prominent member of both groups.)131 C. Vann Woodward observes how intimately the two movements were connected: “The bitter mixture of recantation and heresy could never have been swallowed so readily had it not been dissolved in the syrup of romanticism.”132
Postwar plantation literature (of which plays became an increasingly important part) retains most of the elements of its prewar predecessors. Its only significant innovation is to incorporate the Civil War and Reconstruction into the plot, enabling a clear contrast between the golden age of the past with the leaden reality of the present.133 The plot was usually divided into three sections. The exposition depicts the idyll of the happy peacetime plantation. The outbreak of war and the dissolution of the community follows: the men go to the front; the women stay behind. A time of misery and danger commences. Marauding gangs and renegade Yankee soldiers overrun the plantation. But just as all seems lost, a young Yankee officer and gentleman appears, ready to protect the women from the terrible fate that awaits them. The young belle, initially distrustful of or even hostile toward the Yankee hero, discovers his good qualities one by one and falls in love with him. The plot concludes with a North-South wedding. In Shenandoah, the most frequently performed plantation drama of the time, no fewer than five couples get married at the end.134
The paradigm of symbolic reconciliation between the two regions of the reconstituted nation recurs again and again. As in the New South movement, both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line profit from the plantation-war-marriage trajectory. The South gets to retain the Lost Cause, and its unique cultural identity, symbolized by the plantation, is acknowledged by the North. At the same time, the spirit of the Old South is modernized by the infusion of energy and discipline embodied by the Yankee bridegroom—as it would not have been had the daughter married one of the Oblomovian planter’s sons from her homeland. The Yankee bridegroom is the literary incarnation of the coveted Northern investor of New South propaganda. For his part, the Northerner, as new master, gains control over the plantation romance instead of being relegated, as before, to the role of passive reader. The plantation house, the belle, and the aristocratic lifestyle are cultural trophies with which the North can adorn itself without having to accept the unseemly connotations of any of these institutions. The nature of the trophy itself has been transformed: what once stood for power, substance, conviction, and religion becomes, in the hands of the victorious conqueror, mere ornament, decoration, plaything, and entertainment.
The situation in reality was much the same as in literature.135 Yankee millionaires with economic interests in the South—such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry M. Flagler, and Collis Huntington—inaugurated a series of aristocratic matches by marrying Southern belles, much as their sons would later marry the daughters of Europe’s high aristocracy. Woodward’s commentary is, as always, to the point: “For these aging buccaneers the South was a belated romance upon which they lavished endowments, investments, and the devotion of dotage.”136
In this way, the plantation legend, taken over by the emerging culture industry, ceased to be exclusively a myth of the South. Instead, it became a part of the escapist dream factory that would ultimately appropriate all periods of human history and that would later be known as Hollywood. The Hollywood version of the plantation no longer articulated a distinct Southern self-conception and cultural identity but merely exploited it as raw material—“local color”—to provide the audience with entertainment, diversion, enchantment, romance, and melodrama. In other words, Southern culture was just as subject to Northern colonial exploitation as the Southern economy: both took their directives before and after the war from the cultural and financial center of New York. Like Henry Grady with his visions of the New South, novelists wrote their plantation romances primarily for a Northern audience. Thomas Nelson Page, the most successful exponent of the “plantation school,” advised a young author who was having difficulty selling her novel: “It is the easiest thing in the world. Get a pretty girl and name her Jeanne, that name always takes! Make her fall in love with a Federal officer and your story will be printed at once!”137
The culture industry typically reworks mythological material so extensively, glossing over all genuine difference, that eventually distinctions between victor and vanquished vanish. When Uncle Tom’s Cabin was staged during the 1880s, a number of changes were made in the text that illustrate this transformation. The first dramatic adaptation, written a year after the publication of the novel, retained the abolitionist elements of the original, as did all subsequent adaptations throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction. After the historic compromise of 1877, however, the text began to be “cleansed” of its political, abolitionist content, until what was once a polemical, politically charged drama criticizing slavery had become a piece of full-blown romantic plantation folklore. “The great plot over which so many tears were shed,” Francis Pendleton Gaines writes, “became little more than a convenient thread on which were lavishly strung minstrel gems and rather sympathetic pictures.”138
* * *
DID THE HAPPY ending of the plantation drama, with its North-South marriage, and the transformation of the plantation novel into kitsch indicate that the Lost Cause had finally been abandoned? Or was there still a place for it in the reunified nation? And if so, whose Lost Cause was it? Clearly, the Lost Cause remains part of Southern culture, but it has also, molelike, dug its way into the deepest layers of national mythology. Some concluding observations will suggest how it has.
Victory, like revolution, can devour its children, particularly those who expect more from it than what it actually delivers. The idealists who realize too late that violence can never achieve their goals are among history’s most common losers in victory. This was the experience of Northern intellectuals, particularly from New England, after the Civil War. The outcome they had anticipated from victory over the South was the reconstitution of the old Jeffersonian republic. What they got instead was the Gilded Age, a society whose crass materialism outdid that of Bismarckian Germany and the French July monarchy. The ideals of intellectual New England, represented by men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, and Henry Adams, became another Lost Cause, surpassing even that of the South in its existential intensity. The South was, after all, prepared for its fate. Three decades of stagnation and decline had psychologically attuned it to the possibility of defeat and had produced a fully developed lost-cause mythology that needed only a lost war to become operational. New England intellectuals, on the other hand, were caught by surprise, without any comparable mythological buttresses. Their philosophy, transcendentalism, which had arisen at the same time as the cult of chivalry in the South, was an attempt to create an up-to-date American version of humanism free of all mythologizing. But their effort was to be heavily punished, as Vernon L. Parrington realized in 1927: “In the world of Jay Cooke and Commodore Vanderbilt, the transcendental dream was as hopelessly a lost cause as the plantation dream; it was in an even worse plight, for it left no tragic memories to weave a romance about the fallen hopes.”139 What Parrington failed to see was the possibility that the disillusioned idealists of the North might borrow the South’s mythology of defeat. Such borrowing, of course, did not take place openly and explicitly but rather partially and indirectly, like a shameful secret.
Within the American mythology of optimism, the South became a metaphor for dissatisfaction, self-doubt, and potential as well as for actual catastrophe. The economic crisis of the 1930s proved fertile ground for the Southern literary renaissance of William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and Thomas Wolfe, among others, as the nation began to see its own destiny reflected in that of the Old South. Robert E. Lee became a national icon of heroic defeat, and Faulkner’s Quentin Compson appeared no longer as a case study in pathology, as he had a few years earlier, but as a man of his times.140 No fewer than eighty Civil War novels were published between 1930 and 1939, attracting a huge audience. The most successful of these, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, became a national parable for America’s fall from the heights of the 1920s into the depths of the Depression. The plantation Tara was America, with its own golden age, crisis, and ultimately—American optimism being indefatigable—reconstruction. As Woodward writes: “The experience of evil and the experience of tragedy are parts of the Southern heritage that are as difficult to reconcile with the American legend of innocence and social felicity as the experience of poverty and defeat are to reconcile with the legends of abundance and success.”141
Woodward’s thesis—that the experience of defeat and failure fundamentally distinguish the South from the rest of the nation—needs to be supplemented. The rest of the nation was in fact capable of indirectly comprehending the experience of defeat through the metaphor of the South. In an essay entitled “A Southern Critique of the Gilded Age,” Woodward himself cites three examples of this very phenomenon. Herman Melville, Henry Adams, and Henry James were all among the losers in the victors’ camp. In the prevailing climate after 1865, they all felt, in Adams’s words, as lost as “the Indians or the buffalo who had been decimated by our ancestors.”142 None of these three men had been particularly interested in the South, let alone had sympathized with it. All had deplored slavery. Nonetheless, in their works they used Southerners as mouthpieces for criticizing their times and as representatives of the “other” America.143 In all three cases, the heroes are former Confederate officers whose message differs starkly from that of the Yankee bridegrooms of plantation romance: not the optimistic belief in progress but a critique of a decadent civilization, not the elevation of the South of plantations and belles to the economic and ideological level of the North but the reverse—a profound questioning of the North’s industrial and commercial triumph and a reminder that there were values other than that of the almighty dollar.
But more poetic than any literary representations of the Lost Cause was the personal lost cause of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The leading representative of transcendentalism had raised his voice as loudly as anyone in support of the crusade against slavery. After the Union victory, he fell silent. One reason was his premature senility at the age of sixty-two. For ten years, he existed in a condition of physical and mental decline, writing hardly anything, instead giving public readings of works by writers close to his heart. Among them was Henry Timrod, the unofficial poet laureate of the Confederacy, someone whom Emerson would have viewed with contempt before the war. One of the poems Emerson recited most frequently was Timrod’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Literary historian Lewis P. Simpson surmises that Emerson recognized toward the end of his life that the South’s defeat was also his own. He was no longer capable of articulating this insight, but in Timrod’s lines he may have found the words to speak for him:
Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.
In seeds of laurel in the earth,
The garlands of your fame are sown;
And, somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone.144
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