‘The Lost Cause in Some Ways Won the Civil War’

Janine Jackson interviewed historian Keri Leigh Merritt about the New Lost Cause for the January 15, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Keri Leigh Merritt’s Masterless Men (Cambridge, 2017)

Janine Jackson: You can feel the eagerness of many people, including in the media, to get over January 6, to section those people off as outliers with little to do with the US conversation, much less the mainstream Republican Party, and why don’t we move along to the healing already? Donald Trump, in this rendering, is a unique, lamentable phenomenon that doesn’t represent who “we” are as a country, and when he leaves, those hateful ideas will leave with him.

Black Americans, anyway, know the price of healing without reckoning, because we pay it. And historians, too, are shaking their heads at descriptions of the attack on the Capitol as “unpredictable” and “unprecedented,” because, while it was many things, it wasn’t that.

People are ready to take on a more complicated understanding of this country’s roots. But will news media help inform that conversation, or just inflame, or even worse, ignore it?

Keri Leigh Merritt is an independent historian, author and filmmaker. She’s author of the book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South and co-editor of Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class and Power. She’s also working on a new film on the Civil War. She joins us now by phone from Atlanta. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Keri Leigh Merritt.

Keri Leigh Merritt: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: In the essay that you co-wrote with Rhae Lynn Barnes for CNN.com, you call the Lost Cause of the Confederacy “America’s most successful disinformation campaign.” Folks are kind of talking about the Lost Cause as an idea, but there’s not necessarily a deep understanding of what that’s really all about. I wonder if you can talk about that, and the resonances that lead you and others to talk about Trumpism with reference to a kind of New Lost Cause.

Keri Leigh Merritt: “I think we’ve underestimated how much you can whip up racism and xenophobia by just saying, ‘You were robbed of this, you’ve got something to be angry over, you’ve got something to be aggrieved about.’”

KLM: Right. So I think what’s happening today definitely has its roots in the mid–19th century. And obviously, we’re not the only historians to say this, or to be saying it for the last five years; as you were talking about, we’ve all been saying this since Charlottesville. And to be quite honest, Black Americans and Indigenous Americans, they’ve been saying this for four centuries now. So this is not a surprise to people who have been oppressed in America; it’s only coming as a surprise to white people, and people who have been in a privileged enough position to really not have to know the history, the really bad history, the bad side of our country’s history.

So a lot of the reason they don’t know this bad side of the history is because of the Lost Cause. And the Lost Cause is also known as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. It was basically an ahistorical theory which accomplished two things: One was that all white Southerners supposedly fought for the Confederacy, valiantly and willingly, and really believed in the cause; and they made it into more of a states’ rights issue than the real cause, which was, of course, slavery. And then the second part of the Lost Cause mythology is that all these whites were fighting valiantly for the Confederacy because slavery wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t a bad institution; it was really a benign institution run by these benevolent, Christian men who were trying to uplift and take care of these kind of happy slaves. It’s that kind of imagery that’s in Gone With the Wind and some of these popular cultural representations that all of us know.

But, essentially, the Lost Cause helped to solidify the white South, even up until the very recent past; Georgia, obviously, was an outlier in that this year. But even up until this day, the Deep South, where slavery was at its apex, has traditionally, since Reconstruction, disenfranchised all the Black voters that it could, and united white Southerners of all classes in a white-supremacist, racist ideology that is actually rooted in this Lost Cause–ism.

And we argue that Lost Cause–ism is a type of grievance, right, a way that you get people to be white supremacists and to really have a lot of racial hatred in them, especially among poor whites, or working-class whites, who would have more in common on an economic level or a labor level with other working-class people from different races. You have to engender that by not only rhetoric, but by using grievance as a tool.

And I think we’ve underestimated how much you can whip up racism and xenophobia by just saying, “You were robbed of this, you’ve got something to be angry over, you’ve got something to be aggrieved about.” And scholars like Heather Cox Richardson have shown how this Southern sense of grievance, and white supremacists who are feeling like they were losing control of the country in the 19th century, this ideology really spread west, and then it also took over the whole United States. So essentially, the United States becomes Southern white supremacists, in some ways. And so really, the Lost Cause has in some ways won the Civil War, even up to this day, and we’re seeing how that’s playing out right now.

JJ: You talk about class fissures among white Americans. And media have fed the narrative of Trump supporters as hardscrabble white working-class people, that economic anxiety was the primary driver. But when you look at January 6, at least one of those folks came in on a private jet. And you’ve alluded to it, and I know we talked about it back in 2017 after Charlottesville: the misunderstanding, the kind of instrumental erasure of class difference among white people, is also historically referent.

On CNN.com (1/7/21), Rhae Lynn Barnes and Keri Leigh Merritt call the Lost Cause of the Confederacy “America’s most successful disinformation campaign.”

KLM: Yes, and I have said from the beginning, as well as other scholars, yes, a majority of all whites supported Trump, until these recent elections, across all demographics, and there wasn’t a huge difference between affluent, well-educated whites, and poor and working-class whites.

First of all, I think those things need to be well-defined, because you have a lot of affluent whites that don’t have anything higher than a high-school education. So first of all our categories are messed up in how we’re analyzing all of this.

But second of all, the real drivers of all of this are these elite whites. I mean, who’s running this? Elite white men from the heights of New York wealth and high society. And they’re engendering this class hatred, and we’ve seen it from the first time Trump began running, it was whipping up as much hatred and xenophobia among poor and working-class people as whites as he could. And that’s just a complete continuation of the Jim Crow playbook that goes all the way back to how white supremacists, led by slaveholders and their sons, used a combination of really horrible racist rhetoric, the police state as well—they’ve used police to arrest people for essentially doing nothing and incarcerate as many Black people as they could — and then also with just violence, with vigilante violence, with any kind of terroristic violence that they could get away with.

Reconstruction is the bloodiest period in our nation’s history, in terms of this terroristic violence. We still don’t understand the depths of how many Black people were murdered and lynched during these years. And so we’re seeing today these threats of violence, these threats of white supremacist backlash. And our point in writing the article for CNN is there have to be punishments for all of the leaders, very publicly and very obviously, so that we can hopefully deter this from escalating, essentially.

JJ: And that’s part of the problem from the past, was a lack of repercussion, that essentially, in the name of things we’re used to hearing today, “civility” and “not being divisive,” “reaching across the aisle”; there was a desire to “go forward and not back” and all of that, and that has an effect, that absence of repercussion for this sort of backlash.

John Wilkes Booth

KLM: Right. There were no repercussions for even the leaders of the Confederacy. And so because of this, because Lincoln actually was pretty lenient, but then, of course, an upper-class white Southern zealot comes in and murders Lincoln, and then it’s left to Andrew Johnson, who killed any kind of progress that was to be made in terms of punishing the former Confederates who led this uprising against our country.

And if that had happened, which was the Radical Republicans’ plan at the time—they wanted to punish the Confederates primarily by taking away their huge plantations, and then dividing those up and giving land to freed men and women. And so that would have radically, radically changed the entire trajectory of America; it would have not gotten rid of, but it would have really minimized the incredible racial wealth gap we see today. It would have gotten rid of a lot of the police state, because formerly enslaved people would have land, and thus they would have some political and economic power.

And so because we failed to punish the leaders of the Confederacy, landholding in the South never changed, wealth-holding in the South never changed. Some of these small rural areas in the South are still run by the descendants of the people who ran the big plantations. And power and wealth has never changed hands in much of the rural South.

JJ: Finally, when we had you here in 2017 after Charlottesville, you were talking about an unwillingness or a hesitancy on the part of many historians to “enter the fray.” That they were academics, and getting into the political conversation was sullying somehow. I take it you have not changed your thinking about the idea that there’s an important role for historians in public conversation.

KLM: Absolutely. And we’ve unfortunately seen the backlash of this, over the last couple of years, with professors that have been outspoken about the racist violence in this country, or the brutality of our racist criminal justice system, the people who have actually spoken truth to power about these things have been fired or run out of their jobs, or there have been mobs to literally threaten their families on a daily basis. So anybody who’s actually speaking out about these issues is facing a lot of threats, and in some cases they’re having to give up their entire livelihood, because they’re telling the truth.

JJ: And yet that just speaks to the importance of it.

KLM: Absolutely, yes. The powers that be do not want this information out; they’re cutting education budgets, they’re cutting humanities, they’re cutting history.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with independent historian Keri Leigh Merritt. She’s the author of Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, which is out from Cambridge University Press. She’s also working on a new film on the Civil War with Rhae Lynn Barnes. And her article with Rhae Lynn Barnes, “A Confederate Flag at the Capitol Summons America’s Demons,” can be found on CNN.com. Thank you so much, Keri Leigh Merritt, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KLM: Thank you.