If history repeats itself, then we already have another civil war within the U.S.A. that has already begun. Sadly, the rebels who were defeated previously were left unpunished. They should have all been executed, their assets seized and their families and supporters divested of all their worldly goods. Instead they were permitted to just return home. They kept their businesses, properties and even their careers, which included political careers. So they did not have to answer for their crimes, which is why their poison remained to resurface later. Is it the “White Superiority Syndrome” that was responsible for it? Now we have a new Rebel Leader who has decided to cloak himself with the Mantle of Jefferson Finis Davis, We are talking about Donald J. Trump (the World’s Biggest Loser ).
Just recently, Donald J. Trump has tried to ‘stir up’ the mentally deranged QANON cult followers by releasing a statement that he will be reinstated or assassinated by August, 2021. This clearly makes him an enemy of the justly elected U.S. government -Rebel- as well as an openly declared enemy of the majority of voters who voted against him. He thinks he is unaccountable for his actions and impossible to kill? “Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.” This is the poison left behind from the previous civil war because the rebel “losers” went unpunished.
It didn’t take long for the Loser Southern Rebel States to change their narrative for their intent behind the Civil War from the ‘defense of Slavery’, to suddenly the ‘defense of State Rights’. A lie they still shout out to this very day. A tolerance of delusion that should never have been granted to them to begin with; must now be destroyed.
The Lost Cause: Definition and Origins
October 30, 2020 • Updated March 25, 2021
As the Civil War drew to a close in 1865, defeated Southerners looked around at the death and destruction that the war had inflicted on their homes, businesses, towns, and families. “The South was not only…conquered, it was utterly destroyed…More than half [of] the farm machinery was ruined, and…Southern wealth decreased by 60 percent,” states historian James M. McPherson. The war initiated over the issue of the preservation of slavery, as pronounced in the seceding states’ articles of secession and in the Confederacy’s constitution, was the cause of this devastation. “The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of this organization.,” read one such justification of secession and war in 1861. With the abolition of slavery becoming the law of the land in 1865, it became harder and harder for many Southerners to justify the purpose of the war and the deaths of nearly 300,000 of their sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands. Thus, many Southerners set to work to rewrite the narrative of the war. Former Confederate general and one-time commander of the United Confederate Veterans claimed, “If we cannot justify the South in the act of Secession, we will go down in History [sic] solely as a brave, impulsive but rash people who attempted in an illegal manner to overthrow the Union for our Country.” Thus, from the ashes of war, the myth of the “Lost Cause” was born.
There are six main parts of the Lost Cause myth. The first and most important myth is that secession, not slavery, was the cause of the war. Southern states seceded to protect their rights, their homes, and to throw off the shackles of a tyrannical government. To the proponents of the Lost Cause, secession was constitutional, and the Confederacy was the natural heir to the American Revolution. Because secession was constitutional, all those who fought for the Confederacy were not traitors. Northerners, specifically Northern abolitionists, caused the war with their fiery rhetoric and agitating, even though slavery was on its way to gradually dying a natural death. They also argued secession was a way to preserve the Southern agrarian way of life in the face of encroaching Northern industrialism.
Second, slavery was portrayed as a positive good; enslaved people, who were submissive, happy, and faithful to their masters, were better off in the system of chattel slavery which offered the slaves protection. Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens declared in 1861 “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” Following the end of the war, these formerly enslaved people were now said to be unprepared for freedom, which was an argument against Reconstruction and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution.
The third tenet states that the Confederacy was only defeated because of the Northern states’ numerical advantage in both men and resources. The Confederate Army was less defeated than overwhelmed, as their lesser resources. Former Confederate officer Jubal A. Early justified the Southern defeat by stating that the North “finally outproduced that exhaustion of our army and resources, and that accumulation of numbers on the other side which wrought our final disaster.” Early went on to say that the South “had been gradually worn down by combined agencies of numbers, steam-power, railroads, mechanism, and all the resources of physical science.” The lack of southern manufacturing and the outnumbered population doomed it to failure from the start. Thus, the “Lost Cause”.
Fourth, Confederate soldiers are portrayed as heroic, gallant, and saintly. Even after the surrender, they retained their honor. At one reunion oration, Confederate General Thomas R. R. Cobb, who was killed at the Battle of Fredericksburg, was compared to “Joshua in his courage,…St. Paul in the logic of his eloquence and [St.] Stephen in the triumph of his martyrdom.”
Fifth, Robert E. Lee emerged as the most sanctified figure in Lost Cause lore, especially after his death in 1870. Lee himself became a symbol for the Lost Cause, and a “Cult of Lee” revered the Virginian as the ultimate Christian soldier who took up arms for his state. He was even called the second Washington. Lee was the most successful of all Confederate Army commanders, and after the war, Jubal Early and many former Southern officers placed Lee upon a pedestal—so much so that historian Thomas L. Connelly dubbed Lee “The Marble Man.” Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson became a saintly martyr, wounded by his men while defending the Lost Cause. Even the office building where Jackson died bore the name “The Stonewall Jackson Shrine” for decades. On the other hand, James Longstreet became a villain to Lee and Jackson’s heroes, blamed for the loss at Gettysburg and vilified for his newfound Republican affiliation and the temerity to question Lee’s wartime decisions. Even former Confederate President Jefferson Davis became a reverential figure, seen as the personification of states’ rights.
Finally, Southern women also steadfastly supported the cause, sacrificing their men, time, and resources more than their Northern counterparts. The idealized image of a pure, saintly, white Southern woman emerged as well.
Many of the motifs of the Lost Cause even emerged before the war was officially over. In Lee’s farewell address to the Army of Northern Virginia the day after he surrendered at Appomattox Court House, he thanks his soldiers for “four years of unsurpassed courage and fortitude.” But in the face of “overwhelming numbers and resources,” he was forced to surrender the army to prevent further bloodshed. But the term “Lost Cause” originated almost immediately after the war ended. Edward Pollard, the editor of the Richmond Examiner, published The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, his own justification for the war effort. In 1867, Pollard’s brother H. Rives published one of the first Lost Cause periodicals called the Southern Opinion. This weekly paper argued for a distinctive Southern culture and for the preservation of the heroism of their cause.
Southern women played a large role in spreading the Lost Cause. They immediately converted their wartime soldiers’ aid organizations into memorial organizations, to commemorate their male counterparts who fell during the war. Because women were seen as inherently nonpolitical, and memorializing was not seen as political, they were able to take the lead in memorializing and mythologizing the Southern cause. Ladies’ Memorial Associations were formed all across the South to dedicate Confederate cemeteries and organized Memorial Days for fallen Confederates. They would eventually unite in 1900 to become the Confederated Southern Memorial Association, and by then, their goals had expanded beyond just remembering their dead. Now, they collected Confederate relics and instilled veneration for the Southern cause in the younger generation through textbooks and educational outreach efforts.
In 1869, Confederate veterans including Braxton Bragg, Fitzhugh Lee, and Jubal Early created the Southern Historical Society, to shape the way future generations understood the war; the Lost Cause was central to their mission. In 1876, the society published the Southern Historical Society Papers, a collection of essays defending every aspect of the Southern war effort. Early became the most influential figure in propagating these arguments as part of the Lost Cause. While initially against secession, Early steadily rose through the ranks of the Confederate Army. After the war, he traveled the South, giving lectures and writing articles to defend Lee and attack Longstreet. He also espoused the notion that the war in Virginia was the central theater of the war. Jefferson Davis also published The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, another Lost Cause vindication of the war. Esteemed historian David Blight dubbed the work “perhaps the longest, most turgid, and most self-righteous defense of a failed political cause ever written by an American.”
By the 1880s, many Confederate veteran associations formed to both perpetuate the memory of their fallen brothers and take care of the disabled. These groups consolidated into the United Confederate Veterans in 1889. Auxiliary organizations such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy formed for similar purposes. The Confederate Veteran was founded in 1893 and became the official mouthpiece of the Lost Cause movement. This publication reached a mass audience and was only discontinued in 1932.
Some in the North, especially Union veterans and African Americans, were angered by glorifying the Confederate cause and slavery. However, general public opinion had shifted towards reconciliation with the defeated South, especially after they became disillusioned with Reconstruction. It was telling when two ex-Confederates were pallbearers at Ulysses S. Grant’s funeral. Thus, many Northerners accepted the Lost Cause narrative as a way to mend the wounds of the war and to move the country forward into the twentieth century.
If there is another civil war in the United States, as Dumb Donald and his motley crew of delusional supporters are trying to make it appear that they desire, it will be a Nuclear war. We already discussed that Donald Trump initially withdrew from the Nuclear Treaties in order to revamp the abandoned ‘Davy Crockett‘ low yield Nuclear tipped field infantry launched rockets. He was hoping to use these in the war against Iran that fortunately, he was unable to start (but wishes he can). Now it would seem that these Nuclear weapons will be used in the U.S.A., rendering large portions uninhabitable for generations. If the Republicans are successful at starting the “Civil War to end all civil wars”, you will witness a death toll of no less than 50 million Americans. This should be taken seriously as a warning for those who support or just continue to permit Donald Trump to continue.
