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–2– THE LOST CAUSE AND THE SOUTHERN SIDE OF THE POW DEBATE 1865–1920 IN APRIL 1865 THE CONFEDERACY DIED for all intents and purposes when Generals Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the South’s principle armies to Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman respectively. While white Southerners grieved for their lost cause, Northerners celebrated wildly. Their joy came not only from victory and the chance to finally return home to loved ones; it came also from the conviction that right had triumphed over wrong. The idea that the Confederate States of America had been a morally bankrupt society received official and public legitimacy during Andersonville commandant Henry Wirz’s trial and subsequent execution before the year was out. Ex-Confederates did not want to be remembered as traitors or as members of a degraded society who were defeated by a righteous foe. Many, probably most, white Southerners feared that the victors’ history would become the official version of the Civil War—a concern not without precedent . Jefferson Davis expressed the concern many in his region harbored, warning, “Men live in the estimation of posterity not by their deeds alone, but by their historians also.” To make sure the victors’ history was not the only one that would be available, Davis wrote his massive version of events, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. He made no claims about historical objectivity; this was going to be the pro-Confederate side of the story. By his own admission the project was undertaken to do “justice to the cause and add wherever I could another leaf to her crown of glory.”1 27 That Davis and other Southerners would attempt to portray the Confederate era as a romantic and glorious crusade is not surprising. Nobody wants to be associated with a losing side that lacked any redeeming qualities, which was precisely how Northerners were portraying the former Confederacy and its supporters. An additional burden was the understanding and acceptance by both sides that the war had been a conflict where God would grant victory to the righteous side. Throughout the war, Confederates never doubted ultimate victory because they never doubted their moral superiority to the Yankees. As minister Benjamin Palmer put it in a June 1861 sermon, “at the very opening of our separate career, we bend the knee together before God—appealing to his justice in the ajudication [sic] of our cause, and submitting our destiny to his supreme ajudication.”2 Throughout the war, Davis called for fast days and days of prayer to insure God’s continued support for the Confederacy and its armies in the field. An Atlanta newspaper reminded readers, “our cause is just, and a righteous Judge and God of Battles will decide in our favor.” J. W. Tucker, a minister in Fayetteville, North Carolina, maintained, “God is with us . . . . He is on our side . . . . Our cause is just.” Tucker went on to tell listeners that the Civil War was “a conflict of truth with error—the Bible with Northern infidelity—of pure Christianity with Northern fanaticism—of liberty with despotism—of right with might.” The Baptist minister J. William Jones spoke to his congregation of the “God of Israel, God of the centuries, God of our forefathers, God of Jefferson Davis and Albert Sidney Johnston and Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and the God of the Southern Confederacy.” Methodist bishop George Foster Pierce proclaimed in the spring of 1863 that “The triumph of our arms is the triumph of right and truth and justice. The defeat of our enemies is the defeat of wrong, malice, and outrage.” By October 1864 Confederate victories were harder to come by, causing Brigadier General Stephen Dodson Ramseur’s brother-in-law to doubt the possibility of ultimate Southern victory. “Don’t give up,” Ramseur told him. “We are bound to succeed. The God of Justice will order all things for the good.”3 While not all Southerners were able to rally around the idea that no matter how bad things appeared God would come through for His people, most did, even when their fortunes looked bleakest. To General Sherman such a state of affairs seemed wholly illogical and he commented on this to his wife in 1864. “No amount of poverty or adversity seems to shake their faith,” he wrote. “Wealth and luxury gone, money worthless, starvation in 28 ANDERSONVILLES OF THE NORTH [3.138.200.66] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 17...

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