After the defeat of the Civil War, the reconstruction era brought change to a South that still clung to traditions of grandeur. Economically, the agrarian system of the South was now slowly overtaken by industrialization and politically, the republican government‘s aim was to industrialise the South and transform its plantation agriculture into a system of family farms so as to destroy the political and social legacy of the slave-holding aristocracy. Yet, for the South, ―reconstruction did not mean, as it did for the North, the re-introduction of defeated
states into politics‖ (Dominguez 49), but what Brogan defines as ―rebuilding society from the foundations‖ (375).72
The plantation class was bankrupt (most had mortgaged their estates to support the Confederacy effort), yet they still owned the land and the black codes tried to maintain the old plantation system.73 Yet, the ex-slaves no longer accepted those terms and
white poor farmers themselves remained illiterate and undernourished.
With the loss of most instruments of mastery (slaves, plantation, etc.), the Southern artistocrats started to fear that poor whites and blacks would create an alliance against their interests and thus passed a series of ―Jim Crow‖ laws to ensure that their privilege would remain untouched. However, as Hugh Brogan explains, reconstruction failed both southern whites and blacks alike. Nostalgic of the glorious antebellum days, the South became a
land of introversion and provincialism, a land, it seemed, without hope; a land paying a tragic price for tragic miscalculations… An economic and educational system devised principally to keep things as they were and the blacks unprivileged, was unable to do much for its white citizens either (383).
In this view, the South became glorified as the legitimate heir of the nation created by the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, true sons of the South, intended state governments to be superior to the national government and perhaps would have approved of the actions taken by the Confederate states. In 1798, for example, these two men had written the Virginia/Kentucky resolutions that trumpeted the superiority of states over a national government: Jefferson opposed the constitution exactly because he feared the power 71
Stephen W. Berry, All that Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
72 Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the United States of America (London: Penguin, 1985).
73 As new governments were formed in the Postbellum South, they passed ―black codes‖ that denied Afro- Americans every civil right and tried to maintain antebellum salvery laws: they recognized black marriages as legal (of course, not to a white person), their right to sue or be sued in court and testify against whites, the right to hold property and to be paid wages for their work. Yet, they were denied the right to strike or leave their employment. If any black person was to be found unemployed or travelling without their employer‘s permission, they would be arrested. President Johnson was to denounce these measures as being unconstitutional (Dominguez 47).
of the federal government it proposed. Southerners also knew that they had dominated the Presidency and the Supreme Court since the very beginning, and this domination was also taken as proof of the political and intellectual superiority of the region. In fact, the Founding Father himself, George Washington, was a true son of the South and a slaveholder. Economically too, King Cotton was to drive the nation, for the Southern plantation—it was believed—was economically efficient and self-sufficient unlike the factories and cities of the North or farms of the Midwest. The Old South was portrayed as home to the true United States, recreating Jefferson‘s agrarian republic.
Yet after a devastating war on Southern soil, beliefs of superiority did not suffice. The outcome of the Civil War freed four million blacks, and would, in due course, overhaul the South‘s social and economic system, which had hitherto centered on the Plantation. The failure of President Andrew Johnson‘s program for Reconstruction, which involved a ratification of the thirteenth amendment, led to Congressional action dominated by the so- called ―radical‖ Republicans. Union troops took control of the South, and under their supervision, a new electorate was created. State-level government in the South came under the control of the ―enemy,‖ Republicans, some of whom were black, although the majority consisted of white Southern and northern Republicans known as ―scalawags‖ and ―carpetbaggers‖ respectively. The problem, as Howard Rabinowitz recognized in his work The First New South, 1865-1920, was ―how to hold onto the past while still embracing the future. Support for the Lost Cause can be seen as part of [. . .] the region‘s larger ‗Divided Mind,‘ which reflected the tension between change and continuity‖ (174).74
It is in this context that the South‘s mythmakers created an image of the heroic veteran standing tall against all odds, who should be honoured for his efforts on the battle-field. Yet, not all veterans felt they had been heroic nor did they all stand tall. The men who fought
during the Civil War returned to their homes as losers entering a world that was different from the one they left. Slaves were no longer slaves: many of their family members were dead or wounded; often they were themselves maimed or ill and they represented an era that no longer existed. Veterans of the war were caught in the same dilemma that plagued their region as a whole. They were symbols of the Old South, but they were also flesh and blood people living in a New South and trying to establish an economy. They were defeated, yet acclaimed as heroes. Immediately after Appomattox, throughout the South, there were, for example, assorted days of fasting, prayers, and a day of thanksgiving. Even in defeat, these activities all marked the Confederate cause as a holy cause. Confederate Memorial Days featured trips to the local cemetery to place flowers and flags on the graves of fallen heroes. Confederate generals, especially, received funerals that resembled those given to Presidents.75 All of these
rituals reinforced the myths of both the Old South and the Lost Cause before anyone thought much about there being a New South. None of these ceremonies even acknowledged the reality of defeat, for Confederate veterans were honored and ―displayed‖ long after the war itself was over. The fiftieth anniversary of the war, for instance, led to a spurt of building monuments on the battlefields themselves. Veterans from both sides were paraded out to the sites and granite markers were placed to mark the location of different units (Davis 116).76 As
Hugh Brogan contends,
It would be long before anyone would accept that the whole secessionist adventure might have been morally wrong, socially unwise, politically misconceived. Southern women, particularly, remained forcefully loyal to the ‗cause.‘ Mourning and commemoration were to be major preoccupations for
74 Howard N. Rabinowitz, The First New South, 1865-1920 (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1992).
75 On this subject, we can read: Charles R. Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865- 1920 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1980) 27-29; Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 4 vols (New York: Anchor Books, 1989) 681.
several generations to come; soon war memorials appeared in every important Southern town, usually in the form of a statue of a boy in grey, his heroic young face staring resolutely northwards. The Yankees were not forgiven; their protégés, the freedmen, were not accepted. Slavery was dead, but slavery was what the Africans were meant for, and something as near as possible to slavery was what they were going to get. The South might have been defeated in war, but her resources for racial oppression were by no means exhausted (362).77
As years passed, in Atlanta, the same veterans heard Henry Grady (apostle of the New South) arguing vehemently for a Confederate Soldier‘s Home to take care of the living symbols of the old one. R.B. Rosenburg‘s 1993 work, Living Monuments, discusses the reasons for this spurt of Southern veterans‘ home openings. He ties it to the need of the South to honor the men who fought for its holy cause: ―while the functional significance of homes for both Confederates and Union veterans increased over time—as their populations aged and required greater custodial care—Confederate soldiers‘ homes continued to serve a vital symbolic function for southerners of all ages‖ (5).78
The veteran‘s homes became as much places for young people to visit and learn about the region‘s past as they were places to house the aging veterans. The inmates (which is what they were called) of the homes were subject to strict moral codes of conduct and could be removed from the home for such offenses as coming in drunk or leaving without permission. This reinforces the idea that the homes became synonymous to commemorating the lost cause and veterans became much more important to the South as symbols of what had been rather than as human beings living in the
76 Guy Stephen Davis, ―Johnny Reb in Perspective: The Confederate Soldier‘s Image in the Southern Arts.‖
(Diss. Emory University, 1979).
77 Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the United States of America (London: Penguin, 1985).
78
Randall. B. Rosenburg, Living Monuments: Confederate Soldiers' Homes in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
New South. They were valued and rewarded as long as they conducted themselves in ways consistent with the myths of the Old South and the Lost Cause.
The same need for commemoration influenced the way the next generation of Southerners learned about their cause and their history. Confederate ideologues wanted to ensure—in writing—that no one would forget what they or their fathers had done and why they had done it. Margaret Mitchell, on the contrary, thoroughly believed her novel to be realistic, the antithesis of what she called a ―Thomas Nelson Pagish‖ novel, for ―she considered the plantation myth of the Old South to be Hollywood‘s creation‖ (320):
I believe we Southerners could write the truth about the antebellum South, its few slaveholders, its yeoman farmers, the rambling comfortable houses just fifty years away from log cabins, until Gabriel blows his trump—and everyone would go on believing the Hollywood version. The sad part is that many Southerners believe this myth even more ardently than the Northerners. A number of years ago some of us organized a club, The Association of Southerners Whose Grandpappies Did Not Live in Houses with White Columns… Its membership would be enormous if all the eligibles came in. Since my novel was published, I have been embarrassed on many occasions by finding myself included among writers who pictured the South as a land of white-columned mansions whose wealthy owners had thousands of slaves and drank thousands of juleps. I have been surprised, for North Georgia certainly was no such country—if it ever existed anywhere—and I took great pains to describe North Georgia as it was. But people believe what they like to believe and the mythical Old South has too strong a hold on their
imaginations to be altered by the mere reading of a 1037-page book‖ (qtd. in Silber 320).79
One way for these Southerners to accomplish this romanticization of defeat was by influencing or even altering textbooks to present their view only. In 1892, the United Confederate Veterans approved just nine texts for use in Southern classrooms. All nine were written by Southerners, as if veterans of the Civil War worried that their sons and grandsons would misunderstand—or worse, forget—the struggles of their elders. They also served as teachers and social administrators throughout the region to make sure no one could forget. 80
In Race and Reunion, David Blight concludes that, in the late nineteenth century, the South not only needed what he calls ―a new religion of nationhood,‖ but that Southerners also sought as well as a new theology of manliness.81 Beginning in the 1880s, men like Henry
Grady and Daniel Tompkins used the North as their model to bring Southward a more robust economy (with industry and agricultural diversification), including uplifting the poor by providing manufacturing jobs, thus empowering a new southern aristocracy and giving rise to a white middle class (Friend xv).
These ideologues could also hear Grady proclaiming the arrival of a new, modernized South and speaking of a South rising from its ashes to become the new shining city on the hill. This New South, based on industrialization and urbanization, would take the best features of the Old South and combine them with the assets of the victorious North. If southerners expressed fears about this new industrialization and urbanisation, they were told that in this new order, progress—if it could—would be contained within the boundaries of southern
79 Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
80
Susan Speare Durant, ―The Gently Furled Banner: The Development of the Myth of the Lost Cause‖ (Diss. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1972) 49-50; quotes regarding text books can be found in J. W. Jones, School History of the United States, rev.ed. (New York and New Orleans: University Publishing Co., 1901) 254, 397.
81
David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
cultural values. Economic development would not be permitted to either contaminate the image of the Old South or to corrupt the New South as it had done the North.82 For Henry W.
Grady, the loss of the Civil War did not mean that this distinctive South was to disappear. The New South, indeed, ―was a South said to be refashioned in the likeness of the Victorious North: a South of industry, commerce, and hustle—a South outdoing the Yankees at their own game, yet retaining the charm and graciousness of the Old South‖ (qtd. in Roland 4).83
Replying to those who felt that the division between the North and the South ―existed only as a geographical division of the United States,‖ Wilber Joseph Cash even argued that the South was ―not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it‖ (viii).84