The so called Lost Cause has been ill-defined. The Cause was not slavery; the Cause was self-determination. Slavery was the Issue that was the perceived overreach by the federal government, but the Cause was self-determination. The Issue (for arguments’ sake) could have been something else (unfair taxes/tariffs, sanctions, etc.), and it would have been the same Cause.
Self-determination for the sates at that time was defeated. THAT is the tragedy. Because once self-determination for the states was defeated, it was also defeated for the individual. And the power of the federal government over the states is now absolute. And by extension, the power of the federal, state, and local governments over the individual is also absolute.
How can the right of self-determination ever be re-asserted now? It is publicly decried every time, even by people with supposedly conservative credentials. The reason being that the Lost Cause has been defined as slavery, rather than what many people intuitively know it was, states’ rights, and by extension, individual rights.
So, just because someone argues for states’ rights in 2016, does that mean he wants to return to institutionalized black slavery, or make him racist? Not hardly, but that is exactly the pejorative used to shut him up.
A lot of legitimate political discourse is impeded using this tactic, and it is most disheartening.
“The Cause was self-determination”
Thanks for your nice post.
I don’t think this argument holds because the Southern states were quite fine with using federal power to force other states to follow their wishes, e.g. Dred Scott.
They certainly did not support self determination for non-slave states to make their own policy and laws and used the federal government to enforce their own determinations on states that differed from them.
Utter rubbish and nonsense, first perpetrated by Confederate leaders themselves, but only after their war was totally lost.
Then they immediately set to work creating a whole new mythology, rewriting actual history, to make themselves appear the innocent victims when, in actual historical fact, they were the villainous perpetrators.
In actual fact, Southern Slave-Power Fire-Eaters declared secession, and formed a new Confederacy, beginning in December 1860 -- as they clearly declared -- to protect their "peculiar institution" of slavery.
Then they started war against the United States to both defend their own sovereignty, and to assault the sovereignty of Union states & territory like Missouri or Oklahoma.
After suffering total defeat, and unconditional surrender, they invented a lot of nonsense to justify what, in fact, cannot be justified today in any terms the old Slave Power actually used.