Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

sake of redemption; the other was that much of what the New South boosters claimed for the South simply wasn’t true. Far from bravely admitting that the South was wrong and asking to be trusted again for that honesty, many ex-Confederates insisted that they had been right all along and that they hadn’t the faintest interest in asking Northern pardon for any of it. As the ex-Confederate officer John Innes Randolph sang in Baltimore:

Oh, I’m a good old Rebel,

Now that’s just what I am;

For this “fair Land of Freedom”

I do not care a dam.

I’m glad I fit against it—

I only wish we’d won,

And I don’t want no pardon

For anything I’ve done.23

“Had we been true to our God and country,” wrote Kate Cumming, “with all the blessings of this glorious, sunny land, I believe we could have kept the North, with all her power, at bay for twenty years.”24

This so-called Lost Cause (the term was coined by Edward Pollard in 1866) defended the old order, including slavery (on the grounds of white supremacy), and in Pollard’s case even predicted that the superior virtues of the old South would cause it to rise ineluctably from the ashes of its unworthy defeat. “Civil wars, like private quarrels, are likely to repeat themselves, where the unsuccessful party has lost the contest only through accident or inadvertence,” Pollard defiantly wrote, “The Confederates have gone out of this war, with the proud, secret, deathless, dangerous consciousness that they are the better men, and that there was nothing wanting but a change in a set of circumstances and a firmer resolve to make them the victors.” While the New Southers looked, and looked away at the same time, in the hope of appeasing Northern uneasiness, the devotees of the Lost Cause spurned such gestures, instead staging observances of Jefferson Davis’s birthday, organizing the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and parading the slashed red Confederate battle flag down dusty Southern streets on one Confederate Memorial Day after another. Jubal Early, who may stand as the single most unreconstructed rebel of them all, refused even to contribute funds to a monument to Robert E. Lee in Richmond when he learned that the pedestal would be carved from Maine granite.25

A far greater difficulty in making a case for the New South was the persistent and intractable backwardness of the Southern economy. To be sure, not everything about the post-Reconstruction South was necessarily a step backward: Republicans continued to hold on to some Southern counties and districts for decades after the end of Reconstruction, and in a number of places African Americans continued to vote, and (thanks to the patronage appointments of successive Republican presidents) to hold federal offices in the South. In further defense of the New South strategy, it was also true that the Southern states welcomed with undisguised relief the influx of Northern railroaders, miners, and loggers who fanned out across the South in the 1880s and 1890s as the mining and timber reserves of the far West were gradually depleted. Southern women retained a greater number of the social freedoms that the war had put in their path for longer than their Northern counterparts, including a greater freedom to work and to run businesses.

But all the same, not even the most optimistic New South propagandists could deny for long that the South remained an economic backwater—that its experiments in developing domestic steel and iron industries were a failure; that its networks of postwar textile mills were built on the exploitation of uprooted white workers, most of whom were women and children; that its lumbering industry mostly fed the commercial appetites of the North and left Southern hillsides waste and denuded. Southern per capita income in 1900 still stood at only half that of the rest of the nation.26

Above all, they could not deny the ugly fact of racial injustice. From the 1880s onward, the post-Reconstruction white governments grew unwilling to rely just on intimidation and violence to keep African Americans away from the ballot box and themselves in power, and turned instead to systematic legal disenfranchisement. Recognizing the close intersection of economic status and political power, Southern state governments gradually imposed rigorous segregations of black and white, which ensured that blacks would occupy only the second-class railway cars, the scantiest institutes of education, and the bottom rung of the economic ladder. In the broadest sense, segregation apportioned the towns and the cities to whites and the fields to blacks, and bound blacks to an agricultural peonage—whether in the form of sharecropping or debt tenancy—that smothered the resourcefulness and economic potential of one-quarter of the Southern population. In the name of white supremacy, the South marginalized itself.27

Behind the facade of reconciliation and racial paternalism that the New Southers erected, there was far more common ground between the New South and the Lost Cause than either was eager to admit. The New South novelist Thomas Dixon freely admitted that “the Old South fought against the stars in their courses—the resistless tide of the rising consciousness of Nationality and World-Mission,” whereas “the young South greets the new era and glories in its manhood.” Yet Dixon also entertained notions of white supremacy that would have delighted the last Lost Causer: “This is a white man’s government, conceived by white men, and maintained by white men through every year of its history,—and by the God of our Fathers it shall be ruled by white men until the Arch-angel shall call the end of time!”28

Both New Southers and Lost Causers seized on Robert E. Lee and canonized him after his death in 1870 as a kind of Protestant saint. For the New Southers, Lee’s dignified surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia was a model of Christian fortitude in the face of disaster. His willingness in the years following Appomattox to help rebuild Washington College, a war-shattered Virginia educational institution, as the College’s first postwar president set yet another example of patience and hope. And in order to