One hundred fifty-six years ago almost to the day, Robert E. Lee surrendered his surrounded, starving and thoroughly beaten Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant.
Shortly thereafter, the Civil War came to an end.
Grant's terms, as historian Ty Seidule points out in his recently published and extraordinary volume, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning of the Myth of the Lost Cause, were generous: "No humiliation. No prisoner of war camps. No trials and no hangings . . . Go home under parole and do not take up arms against the U.S. Government."
Lee should have said thank you and silently retired.
Instead, and almost immediately, he gave birth to and began the South's decades long adherence to what became known as the myth of the Lost Cause.
Seidule's book is about the cost of that myth.
Principally to black Americans.
But also to himself.
It is also about the courage needed to confront the myth and kill it.
On April 10, 1865, the day after his surrender, Lee issued General Order No. 9. It was his farewell to his troops. In it he claimed their forces had been "compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources". In a letter he wrote two days later to Jefferson Davis, Lee said he'd been outnumbered five to one.
Thus began the myth.
Like most myths, this one was hydra-headed. In fact, the multiplicity of lies and half-truths that form its core account for its staying power. It pretended to explain everything on the one hand while saving the defeated from humiliation and responsibility on the other.
The myth's first and most immediate claim -- made at the point of surrender -- was, as Seidule points out, "that only numbers and supplies caused Confederate defeat."
This was not true.
As Seidule explains, Grant did not have the numeric superiority military professionals deem necessary for attacking troops, and though Lee's letter to Davis claimed he had only ten thousand soldiers left at the end, "more than twenty-eight thousand applied for parole in less than a week." Lee's army had also fought at home within easy reach of food, supplies and a supportive citizenry. And the Confederacy itself was large -- as Seidule notes, "The United States had to defeat multiple armies over a territory twice the size of modern France and Germany."
The Confederacy didn't lose because it was outnumbered. It lost, as Seidule concludes, because the US Army "was better" -- the "best-led, hardest-fighting, best-provisioned, and most strategically and tactically proficient combat force [then] on the globe." It also lost because the Confederacy's "cause was so flawed." And because the north's leadership -- in Lincoln, Secretary of War Stanton, and the Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, who accomplished the herculean task of supplying troops over a fairly vast sub-continent -- was "unmatched."
The myth's next claim was that the cause of the war had been states' rights. Southerners asserted they were being fleeced by tariffs that helped northern manufacturers but diminished the value of their exports (principally cotton) and that, in taking up arms, they were merely protecting their land against hostile invaders.
Wrong again.
The cause of the war was slavery. Or more particularly, the fear in the south that Lincoln's Republicans would succeed in limiting the institution in the western territories and that, over time, new non-slave states would combine with existing non-slave states to abolish the institution throughout the nation. This was a reasonable fear. It was made possible by the Constitution itself, which permits both the creation of new states and amendments to the actual document. It was hardly, however, a foregone conclusion. In the forty years leading up to the election of 1860, new states had been added and the issue of slavery had been hotly contested as that occurred.
That Constitutional contest would have continued.
When Abraham Lincoln won the full, fair and free presidential election of 1860, however, the South decided that contest had to end. Or, as he put it in his Second Inaugural: "Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish."
"And war came."
Following secession, the Confederates wrote an openly racist constitution for themselves. Unlike its federal counterpart, that constitution enshrined slavery. Unlike the Declaration of Independence, it also enshrined white supremacy. Because it forbade any Confederate state from ever ending slavery, one irony -- as Seidule also notes -- is that it also gave the lie to any notion that states' rights mattered. On slavery in the new Confederacy, only states that were for it had rights.
As America moved through the 19th century and well into the 20th, part of the myth of the Lost Cause was that slavery would have died a natural death. This too, however, is a claim impossible to square with the actual facts. In mid-19th century America, slavery was actually expanding. The cotton gin had made the south's plantation economy extraordinarily wealthy and the number of slaves, particularly in the deep south, was growing. In fact, between 1840 and 1860, the number of slaves had almost doubled.
Another part of the myth was that slavery was actually good for the slaves.
That it civilized them.
That Margaret Mitchell's "happy slave" in Gone With the Wind was real.
When in fact it was just another lie.
Slaves were property. Slaveholders whipped and beat them. Black slave women were regularly raped by them. Their mulatto children became slaves themselves. Their own fathers denied them. And after the war and the brief period of Reconstruction, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, segregation and monument mania took over. Collectively, and well into the 20th century, they terrorized blacks, stopped them from voting, lynched those who talked back (or dated whites), rigorously enforced segregation and racial apartheid, and pretended the Confederacy had been a noble cause defending a traditional society that benefited all its inhabitants.
Seidule is a professional historian and a retired brigadier general in the Army. He grew up in Virginia and Georgia, got his bachelor's degree from Washington and Lee University and his masters and PhD from Ohio State, served in the Army for over thirty years and taught at West Point for seventeen of them.
His book is unsparing in its account of how the Lost Cause permeated all of those places and institutions -- how public schools were closed and private academies financed to avoid desegregation in Virginia and Georgia; how the South in general and his college in particular turned Lee into a secular saint, whitewashing his slaveholding past with false claims of opposition or gentility and erecting hundreds of monuments to an individual who was a traitor; how the Army named dozens of bases after slaveholders and secessionist soldiers, allowed its own hallowed burial ground at Arlington to honor them, for a time endorsed openly racist views of black "fecundity", and resisted integration even after President Truman ordered it; and how West Point initially condemned those of its alumni who violated their oaths in fighting for the Confederacy, only to later erect memorials to them.
Today, a large part of the South along with other "red" or Republican states or legislatures are re-enacting their own version of the Lost Cause in passing so-called election reform laws.
At last count, more than 250 of those laws had been proposed or passed. Typically, they increase voter- identification requirements, shorten early voting periods, reduce the number of drop boxes in which voters can deposit their ballots, make absentee voting more difficult, and limit the ability to correct minor errors (like failing to put one's address on the envelope in which an absentee ballot is returned to be counted) or extend voting hours (a not uncommon occurrence in large metropolitan -- and therefore Democratic -- districts). Though these changes disproportionately burden minorities, that is their point. In the last election, Democrats and minority-voters used these mechanisms in much higher numbers than Republicans.
The genesis of these faux reforms is, like the genesis of the myth of the Lost Cause, the Big Lie.
In the post-Civil War era and beyond, it was the lie that slavery was benign and irrelevant and that the Confederacy was outnumbered in its legitimate efforts to repel invaders and preserve its traditional society and economy.
Today, it is Trump's lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that he in fact won. Republican state officials knew Trump's claim was false and therefore refused, in spite of his demands, to "find votes" or throw out those that had been legitimately cast. Because, however, Trump has persisted in repeating -- ad nauseum -- this Big Lie and 60% or so of self-identifying Republicans now believe it, Republican office holders face a dilemma. Having failed to do Trump's bidding in 2020, either they can vote for these phony reforms and avoid again angering him and those he has brainwashed, the latter of whom vote in large numbers in Republican primaries . . .
Or they can be honest, vote against them, and risk losing.
Guess what they have decided to do.
Just kidding.
If all of these so-called "reforms" become law, a large part of America in the 21st century will resemble the post-Civil War America of the late 19th and early to mid-20th. Instead of voters getting to choose their representatives, the representatives will get to choose their voters. This, of course, is exactly what happened in the post-bellum South. By disenfranchising blacks en masse, erstwhile Confederates were able to ensure that white officials were elected and re-elected for more than a hundred years. In so doing, they were able to . . .
Preserve segregation.
And flibuster anti-lynching and civil rights laws.
Even when the country made progress in the New Deal, FDR's program had to exclude blacks in order to garner the southern votes needed to secure its passage.
The supporters of today's proposed changes cry foul when anyone compares those proposals to what happened after the Civil War. They argue that the right to vote doesn't include the right to vote on Sunday or the right to vote during a three week early voting period or the right to be called in to correct address mistakes on an absentee ballot or the right to have special pandemic-related rules turned into the norm.
But why not?
Even if the right to vote cannot preclude all sorts of administrative regulations, it is certainly inconsistent with regulations that disproportionately burden or exclude minorities. In the old days, the South used poll taxes and literacy tests to kill the franchise for blacks. Today, Republicans are removing mechanisms that facilitate minority voting but do not have any impact on the base Republican vote.
To justify these new exclusions, the GOP is claiming that the reforms are needed to combat perceived election fraud. There is, however, no such fraud, certainly none at a level beyond the present system's ability to discover or cure. Indeed, when ballot harvesting -- the collection by third parties of absentee ballots that the third parties then deliver to election officials -- has resulted in fraudulent votes being cast, it has been easily discovered and prosecuted. And even those cases are rare. In fact, I know of only one.
It is true, of course, that the "perception" of election fraud is widespread among Republicans.
But that is because a former President of the United States has been telling them this lie for more than five years.
The dirty secret is that Republicans do not want everyone to vote. And to whitewash that desire, some of them are even arguing that everyone should not be able to vote, that the "quality" of the vote is as important as its "quantity."
It is unclear precisely what the GOP means by this. Is it that some people are not smart enough to vote? Or that low-information voters, those who do not study the issues to any real degree or take much time deciding, are to be weeded out? Or that voting will be undertaken more thoughtfully to the extent it is not made any easier?
I do not know.
What I do know is that it is not meant to exclude those who rallied to Trump on January 6 and then invaded and trashed the Capitol.
All of whom seem to have swallowed Trump's Big Lie . . .
Becoming, if not low-information voters, then at the very least bad-information voters.
And many of whom, given the choices they made that day, can hardly count as particularly smart.
Intelligence, however, was never a feature of the post-bellum myth of the Lost Cause.
Nor is it a feature of . . .
Today's.
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