![]() Karen Cox, “Historical Context of Civil War Monuments,” American History TV, October 23, 2017. These groups nonetheless maintained publicly that they were motivated by an apolitical desire to honor their ancestors. Significance, such as courthouse lawns and town squares. In the decades that followed, organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which had 100,000 members by the start of World War I, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans began to install Confederate monuments in locations with far more political Gaines Foster, “Historical Context of Civil War Monuments,” American History TV, October 23, 2017, ibid., 260. The first, installed in cemeteries in the 1860s to memorialize fallen soldiers, typically were modest structures that reflected a sentiment of personal mourning. The evolution and promotion of the Lost Cause narrative can be seen in Confederate monuments. ![]() As Edward Pollard, a leading campaignerįor the movement, wrote in The Lost Cause: “To the extent of securing the supremacy of the white man, really triumphs in the true cause of the war.” 618 This narrative minimized the Confederacy’s military defeat and instead celebrated the South’s triumph over Reconstruction, including the withdrawal of federal troops and restoration of the racial hierarchy. 616Īs Davis told it, the North attempted to exercise “unlimited, despotic power” over sovereign Southern states, and Reconstruction extended that federal conquest. Lost Cause supporters argued that the Civil War was not about slavery, but was instead a fight between an industrializing North and a romanticized South. ![]() 615ĭavid Blight, Race and Reunion (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2001),258-59 ![]() ![]() įormer President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, and others, sought to promote a new, “Lost Cause” narrative about the 19th century. 614ĭavid Blight, “Historical Context of Civil War Monuments,” American History TV, October 23, 2017. To the Confederacy across the South as part of a concerted effort to redeem their defeat and build cultural support for the re-establishment of white supremacy. Around the turn of the 20th century, white Southerners installed monuments Much of the Southern - and then national - retelling of the history of the Civil War and the Confederacy took place through monuments and the organizations that formed to erect them. ![]()
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