Lost Cause Religion

The argument of the Lost Cause insists that the South fought nobly and against all odds not to preserve slavery but entirely for other reasons, such as the rights of states to govern themselves, and that southerners were forced to defend themselves against Northern aggression. When the idea of a Southern nation was defeated on the battlefield, the vision of a separate Southern people, with a distinct and noble cultural character, remained.

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The main components of the Lost Cause myth, repeated in writings, sermons, lectures, and speeches by scores of postwar southern figures, are easily identified. First, the prewar South—the Old South—was a place of nobility and chivalry. (There is no better capsule description of the Old South of the Lost Cause myth than the opening words of the movie version of Gone With the Wind, with its elegiac reference to the now-vanished pretty world "of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields," where gallantry "took its last bow.")

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