Dimitri Rotov recently blogged about R.E. Lee Symposium and the reactions to it that I assume he found around the blogosphere. His position is very clear:
I myself am a "Lost Cause" skeptic being underwhelmed by the quality of historians trying to play at historiography here. The idea that there is an identifiable "Lost Cause" school of thought among post-war history writers is a proposition that needs arguments and proofs, not a grab bag of self-serving snippets from selected writings.
Through a careful editing of materials we can as easily construct a "Lost Cause" mythology as we can a "Lincoln’s Virtues" mythology in which a school of history is assembled from Unionist writings that argue Lincoln’s virtues were decisive in winning the war for the North.
Studies of the way in which Americans celebrated and recorded their memories and impression of the war have increased significantly over the past decade. To suggest that they are inventing a "school of thought" is to completely miss the point of these studies.
I think the problem that many people have with historians who study the postwar scene is that they do not want to be reminded that history was up for grabs. In the introduction to his biography, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Harvard University Press, 1974), Bernard Bailyn attempted to explain how distance from the historical event shapes the interpretation. According to Bailyn, early histories "that follow a great and controversial event are still a significant part of the event itself." For the historian, "the outcome [of the event] is still in question," according to Bailyn, and "emotions are still deeply engaged." This emotional attachment to the event by historians "especially those involved in the event in question" leaves wide open issues relating to how the event will be explained, what aspects of it will be remembered, and which participants will be included and why. Throughout this early stage of historical interpretation assumptions and conclusions remain in flux. Only later is the historian able to see clearly from a more detached perspective where "earlier assumptions of relevance, partisan in their nature, seem crude, and fall away." Bailyn’s characterization can easily be mapped onto Civil War historiography.
I don’t see the Lost Cause as a "school of thought" but I do read printed materials and interpret other events as an attempt to understand the past in light of the present. This doesn’t necessarily mean that those sources have little or no value as critical histories, but that often they tell the historian as much about the authors or those taking part in ceremonies as they do about a past they purport to describe and understand. What most historians mean when they reference the "Lost Cause" is a set of assumptions that emerged following the war in both the North and South and that could be seen in a wide range of political, social, religious, and cultural acts.
There is nothing conspiratorial about this, in fact, each of us can appreciate the assumptions that drive historians of the Lost Cause and memory more generally. Consider the following passage from the philosopher Daniel Dennett:
We, in contrast, are almost constantly engaged in presenting ourselves to others, and to ourselves, and hence representing ourselves–in language and gesture, external and internal. The most obvious difference in our environment that would explain this difference in our behavior is the behaviour itself. Our human environment contains not just food and shelter, enemies to fight or flee, and conspecifics with whom to mate, but words, words, words. These words are potent elements of our environment that we readily incorporate, ingesting and extruding them, weaving them like spiderwebs into self-protective strings of narrative. Indeed. . . when we let in these words, these meme-vehicles, they tend to take over, creating us out of the raw materials they find in our brains. (Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained 1991)
As the passage above suggests, we distinguish ourselves from external objects by spinning a different kind of web involving words which are stringed together to construct stories. And much of that self-narrative is historical. We constantly revise our own story about ourselves. This is one of the reasons I am so interested in how Americans remember their collective past. It is reasonable to suggest that some of the same factors that shape our collective memories are responsible for the continual revision of our own pasts. You can see this specifically in the context of those more traumatic moments in our lives that involve great sadness. What we believe to be the case in the immediate aftermath of such events looks very different further down the road. We gain perspective, forget certain facts, and even invent new ones.
Perhaps one way to think about the study of the Lost Cause is to understand it as reflective of the of the psychological process that each of us engages in as a matter of basic survival. History opens up a window into those moments where this process is manifest writ large.
After having done my annual month of posts related to the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause dogma, I’m reminded that the ideological idolization of the Confederacy and its great saints who fought for States Rights and Honor and Home and Family but not for slavery – oh, no, nothing to do with slavery! – has a definite resemblance to quicksand. If you try to sort through every twist and turn of what passes for reasoning among the Lost Cause fans, you can quickly get confused about whether you’re coming or going, all the while feeling you’re sinking deeper into the muck.
I hear from a good source that Edward Sebesta is working on some publications about neo-Confederacy, which should be useful for those of us who are cursed with a willingness to sort through at least some corners of the Lost Cause quicksand pit. Maybe one day some enterprising soul(s) will set up a Lost Cause equivalent of some of the reference sites that are available to research the bogus claims of Holocaust-denial pseudohistory, like Nizkor.com or the German-language site Shoa.de. With those sites, when you see a statement like, “Claims that four million were killed at Auschwitz discredited!”, you can find some decent information about it quickly.
I stumbled across a pet claim of the neo-Confederate pseudohistorians the other day that there were 60,000-93,000 African-Americans who were in some way working for the Confederacy, but presented to sound like there were that many black Confederate *soldiers*, which is (to put it mildly) not the case. But by Googling for a while, I could only trace it back to an American University professor, Edward C. Smith, but I couldn’t find where he initiated it. From what I’ve seen so far, it may have first appeared in a column in the rightwing, Moonie-owned “Washington Times”, which is kind of notorious for pimping neo-Confederate notions. And it was quoted at sites like FreeRepublic.com, almost all of them referring back to the Moonie Times column.
On the subject of real history, I think and hope that studying the actual history of the Civil War itself, as well as the political battles that led up to it and the developments that followed, is the best antidote to neo-Confederate/Lost Cause distortions of history. As you’ve said, Kevin, the Lost Cause ideologues generally won’t engage with actual historical arguments as such. But actually knowing something about the history lets the rest of the world distinguish among varied claims and have some idea whether they are serious or not.
On what’s really a separate track but inevitably related to the history itself in some way, various groups use Confederate imagery to promote a contemoporary white supremacist ideology, though they won’t publicly accept that label, either. In their world, it’s black people (mainly), along with Liberals and similarly sinister groups, who promote racism by complaining about discrimination or not having a sense of humor about racially-derogatory spewing by the Don Imuses and Rush Limbaughes of our world.
I have no idea what Dimitri Rotov’s politics are. But his little mind-bender about how you shouldn’t use “Lost Cause” because “Lost Cause advocates” are really people who oppose Lost Cause ideology (or something like that!) is a red flag for the kind of up-is-down thinking that is common as dirt among the neo-Confederate types.
Your comments on why “Lost Cause” is already a reasonably-well understood concept make sense to me. In fact, one of the first key texts of this particular trend of post-Civil War apologia for the Confederacy was the book, “The Lost Cause” by Edward A. Pollard, published soon after the war. He mainly focuses on military issues. But he also trots out still-familiar arguments trying to minimize the role of slavery in causing the war. Hey, look, South Carolina was fighting over the tariff and states rights three decades before the war began so how can it be about slavery?! But, as close as Pollard was to the actual event, he found it much harder than later writers to avoid talking about how slavery was at the center of all the conflicts that made those abstract principles of States Rights and noble concepts of Honor and such lead to war. The war which was all the Yankees’ fault, of course.
Those notions became part of the political ideology of the so-called Redeemer movement and the Southern Democratic state parties. It always makes things messier when particular historical images get intertwined with political ideologies in that way.