We are now smack in the middle of Confederate Heritage Month, and in honor of the occasion, the Atlantic magazine blogger Matthew Yglesias noted the following: “Why one would want to celebrate a heritage of violent rebellion against a democratically elected government in order to perpetuate a system of chattel slavery is a bit hard for me to say.”
He’s not from the South.
Yglesias’s hundreds of commenters were no different, however, railing nearly in unison against the mythologizing of history. The Lost Cause is a delusion, they cried, and a lie. And as an editor whose business is history, I am tempted to agree. But I have always been persuaded otherwise by something Bruce Catton wrote in Reflections on the Civil War (1987) about the legend of Robert E. Lee. This is written by a Northerner, mind you, and (judging by E. B. Long’s slightly defensive introduction) a man who wanted to be judged not as a beloved cultural figure (c.f. Shelby Foote), but as a historian.
Catton observed that, while a civil war, of all wars, is most likely to engender “irreconcilably angry feelings” and “incurable hatred,” that did not happen in the United States. There was peace after Appomattox, and there continues to be peace.
I think the chief reason for this is the legend of Robert E. Lee and the heroic Confederate soldiers. For this legend was the channel though which pent-up emotions could be discharged. The essence of the legend of Lee and the dauntless Confederate soldiers was that they suffered mightily in a great but lost cause. The point is that this very phrase accepts the cause as having been lost. There was no hint in this legend of biding one’s time and waiting for a moment when there could be revenge. This was the lost cause; something to be cherished, to be revered, to be the outlet for emotions, but not to be the center of a new outbreak of violence.
Catton suggests that a legend (or a story or a myth) surrounded Lee & His Men, that, by its very nature perhaps, it was not historically accurate, but that, by its very nature, it had a purpose. It was like a salve, protection from a pain too great to otherwise face. Of course, it didn’t just protect Lee and his losers. To an even larger extent, it protected the winners, too. Catton continues:
In that sense, I think the legend of the lost cause has served the entire country very well. The things that were done during the Civil War have not been forgotten, of course, but we now see them through a veil. We have elevated the entire conflict to the realm where it is no longer explosive. It is a part of American legend, a part of American history, a part, if you will, of American romance. It moves men mightily, to this day, but it does not move them in the direction of picking up their guns and going at it again. We have had national peace since the war ended and we will always have it, and I think the way Lee and his soldiers conducted themselves in the hours of surrender has a great deal to do with it.
This is, I think, an amazing admission from a historian: that a legend—the facts of which are not, in fact, facts, but exist outside the historian’s purview, snubbing their nose at him even—is important.
IMAGE: Let Us Have Peace, 1865 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1920), courtesy Virginia Historical Society