Over the course of this year, we’ll be interviewing some of the prominent speakers scheduled to speak at the 2016 CWI conference about their upcoming talks and their thoughts about Reconstruction and its legacies. Today, we’re speaking with Kathryn Shively Meier, Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Dr. Meier is currently working on a biography of General Jubal Early.
CWI: What are the core elements and ideas that comprise the “Lost Cause?” When and why did it emerge, who were some of its prime architects and supporters, and in what forms did it manifest itself?
MEIER: The Lost Cause, or the collective Confederate memory of the Civil War, most notably emphasizes states’ rights, rather than slavery, as the cause of the war. In the words of Jubal A. Early, a former Confederate general and key architect of the Lost Cause, “During the war, slavery was used as a catch word to arouse the passions of a fanatical mob . . . but the war was not made on our part for slavery.” Early’s 1866 assertion directly opposes the declarations of secession passed by several seceding states in 1861. For example, Mississippi’s declaration of secession read, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery–the greatest material interest of the world.” Other primary tenets of the Lost Cause include the claim that secession was legal, the portrayal of slavery as benign, an explanation of Confederate defeat chiefly as the result of inferior manpower and materiel, the glorification of Robert E. Lee and his lieutenant Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and the practice of extolling Confederate soldiers and Confederate women. Continue reading “The Legacy of the Lost Cause: An Interview with Kathryn Shively Meier”
