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5 Creating the Myths of Reconstruction, Redemption, Reconciliation, and the New and Future South The Rest of the Story Lost Cause rhetoric included not only defense, glorification, and justification of the Confederacy and the Old South and its war heroes, but also the clearly connected and relevant mythology of what happened to the region after Appomattox . The Civil War may have been the great epic event of south­ern history , but the decades that followed were almost its equal. The narrative of tradition, defeat, wartime glory, and inevitable disaster had to be rounded out with the additional stories of the black days of Reconstruction, the satisfaction of Redemption, the patriotic appeal of Reconciliation, and, based on all that, the New and Future South, which included segregation for black south­ ern­ ers as much as it included industrial growth. The rhetoric of the Lost Cause spread its net widely, capturing the culture of the white South in so many of its various manifestations. These speakers and their Lost Cause rhetoric about the postwar era fostered and reinforced the demagogues and racists of the mid-­ twentieth century as much as or more than did their oratory about the war itself. The breadth and depth of the Lost Cause formed and shaped the South for decades to come—many would say even into the twenty-­first century. “In the hands of carpet-­ baggers and brigands”: The Story of Reconstruction That old devil, General Sherman, was not the only scapegoat burned on the altars of the Lost Cause. Reconstruction, that “cruelest injustice and violence ,” “the Stygian darkness,” “the blackest page of national history,” the “high carnival of crime,” compares well with the “habits of the revelry of a Caligula or a Nero”in the mythology created and reinforced over and over by south­ ern speakers. For many Lost Cause orators, it was as if the North were Creating the Myths of Reconstruction 97 taking unfair advantage of the defeated South, sort of a“kicking us while we are down” attitude. Landon Bell reflected this perception when he reminded his audience in 1929 that “for a long time after the end of the war . . . the South was prostrate, in the hands of carpet-­ baggers and brigands, commissioned and backed by the government, which was controlled by vindictive men.” As historian James C. Cobb puts it, and as scores of Lost Cause orators confirmed, “the Reconstruction era was a time of shock and upheaval for Delta whites”—and, by extension, most whites across the region.1 There were many rhetorical pictures of Reconstruction, but a striking one was the verbal portrait painted by wartime governor of North Carolina , Zebulon B.Vance. He alluded to the original terms of surrender offered by General Sherman to General Johnston in North Carolina at the end of the war, terms that, if “ratified at Washington” rather than rejected, would have allowed the officials of every south­ ern state to swear allegiance to the Constitution,“and the domination of the Union would have been complete at once.” The result of these terms, according to Vance, would have been, “no such thing as reconstruction; no such thing as eleven States reduced to military districts, with all civil authority overthrown and the bayonet become due process of law. There would have been no such thing as eleven blood-­ stained, war-­ ridden and desolate States plundered of two hundred and sixty millions by the last and infinitely worse invasion of the army of carpet-­ baggers. . . . The terms would have saved the South the horrors of recon­struction.”2 An even more belligerent and “unreconstructed” view of the decade following the Civil War was developed in a 1892 speech to a veterans’ reunion in Jackson by Josiah A. P. Campbell, the chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court. Campbell’s diatribe is close to the stereotype depicted in this part of the Lost Cause mythology through much of the twentieth century. Justice Campbell claimed that“the long, dark night of reconstruction,” with its“hideous deformity,”could truly be described by“neither tongue nor pen.” Later, he asserted, “the long, dark, wearisome night of reconstruction, with its blighting, withering, devastating effect on the country . . . the extreme descent which civilization could endure . . . society trembling on the very brink of the awful abyss of anarchy and barbarism . . . borne down and repressed by the strong arm of federal power”could be summed up as the“terrible period of reconstruction . . . that hideous era.” The period was so horrendous in the...

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