The perpetuation of the Lost Cause myth

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After the Civil War ended many southerners were devastated, families lost fathers and sons, farms were destroyed, and the pride of the being southern had taken a serious blow. To bring back a pride of what it means to southern many groups arose to help shift the blame of why the war was lost. One of the most prominent groups was the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), who were founded in 1890. With the founding of the group the UDC had one purpose in mind “… the desire to educate the young with proper histories lest they forget the sacrifices of their fathers, and mothers,…”. This was done through numerous conduits, the first being influencing the reading material children had access to. Books that were not seen to agree with the UDC version of history were removed from libraries because they did not present a “true history for children of the South”. The books that remained in small town southern libraries reinforced the tenets of the Lost Cause, along with the removal of books the UDC also authored an answer booklet called “U.D.C. Catechism for Children”. This booklet contained a series of questions and pro-south answers. In Major Problems in the History of the American South a copy that was published in 1912 contains passages like “What causes led to the war between the States, from 1861 to 1865? The disregard, on the part of the States of the North, for the rights of the Southern or slave-holding states How were the slaves treated? With great kindness and care in nearly all cases, a cruel master being rare, and lost the respect of his neighbours if he treated his salves badly. Self-interest would have prompted good treatment if a higher feeling of humanity had not. What purposes have the Daughters of the Confederac... ... middle of paper ... ...s the way to achieve the goal and the goal itself also helped continue the myth of the Lost Cause. If whites are superior to the blacks this means slavery was a good institution and the natural order of things. These white supremacists sought to make the freed black man as a beast, who was unsuitable for society without slavery. “It has been the regret of my life that I did not make record of his many expressions in grandiloquent language of his own coinage.” This quote from a Confederate Veteran magazine story shows how the black man was seen as this type of dumb fool. He’s speaking a language that he made up on his own, almost as if he has the same intelligence of a child. More works were published to show the blacks of the South as unintelligent, including books containing racist pictures displaying blacks as more closely related to apes than to the white man.

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