The Religion of the Lost Cause

     The American Civil War was devastating for both sides. However, the Confederates and the Unionists equally believed that God was fighting exclusively on their side—for their cause.

The Confederates fought for the preservation of slavery and Southern independence. The Union fought for the preservation of the Union itself and to stop the spread of slavery.

The Union eventually won but at a tremendous cost. Their cause and their claim of God on their side was vindicated though, through their victory. Contrarily, the Confederates lost, and at considerable cost as well. So, what of their cause, and what of their claim that God fought on their side?

No Lost Cause

     Even though they lost the war, the Confederates did not surrender their cause or claim. Instead, as Ray Notgrass states in Exploring America:

(…) they adapted their worldview to the new reality. (…) [They] compared [their] experience to the suffering and death of Jesus Christ.

     They called that comparison The Religion of the Lost Cause. Let’s define religion, and a lost cause before we move any deeper into this topic:

religion, a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices (merriam-webster.com)

So religion is a system of devotion to something,

lost cause, [some]thing that is certain to fail (merriam-webster.com)

and a lost cause is a hopeless or defeated reason.

The Confederates’ reason for fighting was defeated in the war, but instead of accepting that, they turned it into a new religion.

Nation Dies, Culture Born

     In the introduction to the book “Baptized in Blood, The Religion of the Lost Cause 1865–1920” Charles Reagan Wilson very frankly summarizes the mindset of most Southerners post-Civil War. Wilson wrote:

This is a study of the afterlife of a Redeemer Nation that died. The nation was never resurrected, but it survived as a sacred presence, a holy ghost haunting the spirits and actions of post–Civil War Southerners.

     So far Wilson is saying that the Confederate nation died, and was never resurrected, but survived as a spirit or a mindset. Continuing:

Embodying the dream of Southerners for a separate political identity, the Confederacy was defeated by Father Abraham [Pres. Abraham Lincoln] and apparently more blessed, as well as more self-righteous, Redeemer Nation.

     Here Wilson says the Confederacy was better for the defeat. Continuing:

But the dream of a separate Southern identity did not die in 1865. A political nation was not to be, and the people of Dixie [Southern U.S.] came to accept that; but the dream of a cohesive Southern people with a separate cultural identity replaced the original longing.

Dixie (loc.gov

     So Southerners accepted that they would not become a separate nation so they replaced their original dream with the more feasible goal of becoming a separate cultural identity. Continuing:

The cultural dream replaced the political dream: the South’s kingdom was to be a culture, not of politics. Religion was at the heart of this dream, and the history of the attitude known as the Lost Cause was the story of the use of the past as the basis for a Southern religious moral identity, an identity as a chosen people.

     Here Wilson states that the Lost Cause is an attitude of using the past to shape one’s religious moral identity.

The Lost Cause was therefore the story of the linking of two profound human forces, religion and history.

Mediation

     There were two who fought the U.S. Civil War, but between both sides were numerous divisions. Even after the Unionists won there was division over how the “Reconstruction” should be done.

With so many sides, so many views, and so many reasons for fighting, how could the war be justified? Perhaps the U.S. President of the time, Abraham Lincoln, holds the reason. According to an article at (ashp.cuny.edu):

In [an] open letter to Horace Greeley, President Lincoln maintained that the central cause of the Civil War was to keep the country united and not to free the slaves. Greeley was a reformer, abolitionist, and editor of the New York Tribune, an influential newspaper in the North. Days earlier Greeley had written an editorial criticizing Lincoln for not enforcing the Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862. These acts declared that slaves in Confederate territories were contraband (confiscated property) of war and that any slaves who ran into Union lines should not be returned to their rebel owners. A month later, on September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation announcing that if the Confederacy did not stop fighting and rejoin the union by January 1, 1863, all slaves in Confederate states would be freed.

     So Lincoln’s one reason for war was to keep the Union together, by any means. One moment to free the slaves would be bad, but the next moment he used freeing the slaves as a threat. He appealed to abolitionists while simultaneously posing little to those pro-slavery. In the letter to Greeley, Lincoln states:

If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that….

letter to greeley (loc.gov)

Zion’s Conclusion

     Many other examples could illustrate the theme of using war to pursue one’s will–the will of the President to save the Union, and gain political fame; the will of confederates to preserve slavery and/or gain independence from the Union; the will of abolitionists to abolish slavery. The Religion of the Lost Cause is simply following in the footsteps of this “battle of clay” to be molded into any desire–the Southern desire being:

a separate cultural identity


Works Cited

Notgrass, Ray. Exploring America. 2019 ed., vol. 1, Notgrass Company, 2019. 2 vols.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920. University of Georgia Press, 1980.

Abraham Lincoln, “Abraham Lincoln Explains His War Aims,” SHEC: Resources for Teachers, accessed November 28, 2023, https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1751.

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