For decades the myth of the Lost Cause went unchallenged. Whites who felt that they were victims because they had to live with the fact that the South lost the Civil wove an elaborate tale of the noble South who lost to an intrusive Northern based United States government. In this tale, slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War. In fact, the argument went, blacks proudly fought for the South. Lies were interwoven into history.
The first significant monument to a Confederate military figure, a standing statue of Stonewall Jackson, was unveiled on Oct. 26, 1875, in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, just 10 years after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. Thousands of Confederate veterans joined tens of thousands of onlookers in a parade down the streets of a city decorated with flags, flowers and portraits of Jackson. They passed arches and towers bearing inscriptions like “Warrior, Christian, Patriot,” ending in Capitol Square, where the statue was unveiled. Gov. James Kemper, himself a Confederate veteran, welcomed them.
The former Confederate capital was now a center of Confederate memorialization and “Lost Cause” ideology. Over the next decades, it would help develop both. In 1890, the city unveiled an imposing equestrian statue of Lee, in a ceremony attended by at least 100,000 people. And in 1896 the all-female Confederate Memorial Literary Society opened the Confederate Museum, an institutional home for Lost Cause revisionism.
A museum in Richmond, Va. seeks to help challenge the myths about the Civil War.
The new American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Va., sits next to the James River in the historic Tredegar district, where slaves and immigrants once produced munitions for the Confederate Army. The product of a merger of the American Civil War Center and the Museum of the Confederacy, the new museum seeks to tell an inclusive story of the war in hopes of dispelling some of the myths and misconceptions that still dominate popular understanding.
This is another step in dispelling the untruths told about the war.
Other steps in crushing the myth is the removal of Confederate statues from public squares. Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans noted the following:
The more I read, the more I learned that these statues were indeed propaganda put up years, and often decades, after the Union was preserved. During Reconstruction and the 1960s Civil Rights era, there were specific attempts to erect statues like those of Robert E. Lee or Beauregard not only across the South, but indeed, across the country.
Well into our journey, the Southern Poverty Law Center put out research showing there were some 700 Confederate memorial monuments and statues erected long after the Civil War. According to their research, “two distinct periods saw a significant rise in the dedication of monuments and other symbols,” the first around 1900 through the 1920s and the second in the 1950s and 60s. They coincided with the 50th and 100th anniversaries of the Civil War as well as attempted advancements by African-Americans.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-i-learned-about-cult-lost-cause-180968426/
Coming to grips with the past in an honest fashion is a much needed change
By Tom Kludt @ CNN Business, May 16