Lost Cause Religion - The Diigo Meta page

• 27 Jan 08
  

  David Voelker

  Civil War Lost Cause reconstruction history racism

  • The argument of the Lost Cause insists that the South fought nobly and against all odds not to preserve slavery but entirely  for other reasons, such as the rights of states to govern themselves, and that southerners were forced to defend themselves  against Northern aggression. When the idea of a Southern nation was defeated on the battlefield, the vision of a separate  Southern people, with a distinct and noble cultural character, remained.
  • The main components of the Lost Cause myth, repeated in writings, sermons, lectures,  and speeches by scores of postwar southern figures, are easily identified. First, the prewar South—the Old South—was a place  of nobility and chivalry. (There is no better capsule description of the Old South of the Lost Cause myth than the opening  words of the movie version of Gone With the Wind, with its elegiac reference to the now-vanished pretty world "of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields," where gallantry "took its  last bow.")

    • *Gone with the Wind* is a great example, but so too is the earlier film *Birth of a Nation*.
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  David Voelker on 2008-01-27
  *Gone with the Wind* is a great example, but so too is the earlier film *Birth of a Nation*.

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• 
  David Voelker on 2008-01-27
  This page from the *New Georgia Encyclopedia* explains the "religion" of the "Lost Cause," which white Southerners used to defend their honor after the Civil War.

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