Huntsville, Al… Author George Orwell’s famous quote “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past…” Past events are survived only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. When a group is in full control of all records, and equally in full control of the minds of its members, it goes without saying that the past is whatever the group chooses to make it.
This brings me to the good tea that I want to share. While watching a documentary on Reconstruction after the Civil War, the narrator referenced a document called The Lost Cause of the Confederacy so I decided to read and see what this document was about. Having done so all that I can say is WHOA! I see now why some White Americans are so strong in their beliefs about African-Americans.
You have to go back to the Civil War or should I say the end of the Civil War when Ulysses S. Grant whipped Robert E. Lee and he surrendered in 1865. This didn’t sit well with most southerners. So here is what happened a nutshell. The Lost Cause or one would say a “New Southern History” reflected the sentiments of rebels clinging to their ideology. While the South had lost the Civil War they could still wage and win the war of ideas. The Lost Cause found its way to the Southern Historical Society and became the vehicle for presenting the Confederate version of the war. Those who pushed The Lost Cause said that the Confederates were not defeated on the battlefield but they were overwhelmed by massive Union resources and manpower and was destined to loose from the beginning. (First Alternative Fact). Lost Causers said they “only fought for state sovereignty, states’ rights and national independence…” in other words to preserve their way of life which included slavery.
To continue this alternative fact, they had to get a hero. So they chose Robert E. Lee, five years after he died. This was one of the first of many statues to be erected to support this lie. Remember Lee surrendered. Any man who they believed to be a hero and supported the Southern way of life had a statue built.
They have their first alternative fact, and they have their heroes. Now how can they make sure that this ideology for white supremacy continues on to the generations that will come later? First it starts with the “Jim Crow Laws” during the “Reconstruction Period.” When the South started to beat back the Reconstruction policies, they stopped talking about the “loss” and started talking about how they had defeated the North’s effort to reconstruct the South and they had defeated black rights and black suffrage.
Confederate veterans and Southern organizations worked to make sure that school textbooks portrayed the Confederacy’s goal effectively thus changing the way its causes were understood. For centuries they have used textbooks and it continues today.