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6 The Persistence of a Myth The Lost Cause in the Modern South There is no question that Confederate ceremonial events and the rituals and rhetoric that created the cult of the Lost Cause made a deep and abiding impression on the white citizens of the post–Civil War South. A typical example of these celebrations and their impact on their communities occurred in Augusta, Georgia, in 1887.A newspaper reporter described the event:“The celebration of Memorial Day this year will certainly be on a grand scale, the Survivors’ and Ladies’ Association having entered into the movement with great earnestness and in thorough accord. All the railroads have arranged reduced rates, and thousands of visitors will be in the city.” The organizing committee asked all of Augusta’s stores to close for the day. The newspaper editorialized: “It is but right that our business men should accede, for April 26 is now really the only holiday into which the city enters with any extent .”1 With this much emphasis placed on the Memorial Day celebration and the involvement of the veterans’ reunion groups, there is no doubt that these rituals created, enhanced, and solidified the south­ ern white community and developed a sense of continuity in the face of overwhelming change. For some white south­ ern­ ers, this community continues in the early years of the twenty-­ first century. As David Goldfield concludes, for many south­ ern whites in the twentieth century “the past had become so much part of them that it became their identity.”2 This identity is still alive and well. The Lost Cause orators surveyed here are representatives of their type; they, and many hundreds not mentioned, through their rhetoric and rituals, transformed the violence, blood, and defeat of war into a symbol of regional unity, solidarity, and stability. Building on the South’s traditional ties to the past and its honor of heritage,they helped bond white south­ern­ers into a culture that memorialized and reverenced the past. They helped create a white The Persistence of a Myth 117 consensus regarding the past, a consensus that was expected to drive and guide the present and illuminate the future. The Lost Cause generation expected no less, and it did all in its power to ensure this outcome. The historian of the United Daughters of the Confederacy , Mary Poppenheim, knew that at some point the people of the wartime generation would be gone, and “that era with its valor and its glory; its triumphs and its defeats; its heart-­ breaks and its sorrows; its loyalty and its devotion, will soon be a dream, a great adventure, but its influence on the South will be everlasting for the good of her people and through them, for the good of America.”3 Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin knew that her father’s generation had a mission to accomplish, as it “became the preoccupation of their kind to preserve the old foundations at all costs.”4 That mission was largely carried out on warm April and May days when the white community gathered on city corners and town squares to celebrate the unveiling of the granite monuments honoring the Confederacy, or in a local cemetery covered with colorful spring flowers where tribute was paid to the dead on Memorial Day, or in the crowded and bustling arena where the old veterans gathered once again to share their war stories and hear the orators proclaim their wartime feats. For the most part, the audiences that stood in front of the Lost Cause speakers had a broad and deep shared memory and heritage. The mention of Lee or Stuart, Jackson or Hill, Shiloh or Gettysburg, Chattanooga or Atlanta ,Vicksburg or Antietam, all meant the same:“We were there,”whether it was the aging veterans who really had been there, or the younger generations who had heard the tales over and over again from their fathers and ­ uncles and grandfathers who were preoccupied with preserving the “old foundations at all costs.” They were bonded both by blood spilled and by blood in the veins. Of course they remembered and passed it along like their very genes to their progeny and beyond, to all who would listen. In one of the typical romantic rhetorical descriptions of the process of remembering , Stephen D. Lee described for his Richmond veterans over four decades after the guns were silent how glamorous and glorious the war had been. Lee depicted the“children and grandchildren”gathering about the...

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