The False Cause

Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory

Adam H. Domby

• Editorial: University of Virginia Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813943770
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: American Civil War History

The Lost Cause ideology that emerged after the Civil War and flourished in the early twentieth century in essence sought to recast a struggle to perpetuate slavery as a heroic defense of the South. As Adam Domby reveals here, this was not only an insidious goal; it was founded on falsehoods. The False Cause focuses on North Carolina to examine the role of lies and exaggeration in the creation of the Lost Cause narrative. In the process the book shows how these lies have long obscured the past and been used to buttress white supremacy in ways that resonate to this day.

Domby explores how fabricated narratives about the war's cause, Reconstruction, and slavery—as expounded at monument dedications and political rallies—were crucial to Jim Crow. He questions the persistent myth of the Confederate army as one of history's greatest, revealing a convenient disregard of deserters, dissent, and Unionism, and exposes how pension fraud facilitated a myth of unwavering support of the Confederacy among nearly all white Southerners. Domby shows how the dubious concept of "black Confederates" was spun from a small number of elderly and indigent African American North Carolinians who got pensions by presenting themselves as "loyal slaves." The book concludes with a penetrating examination of how the Lost Cause narrative and the lies on which it is based continue to haunt the country today and still work to maintain racial inequality.

1

Rewriting the Past in Stone

Monuments, North Carolina Politics, and Jim Crow, 1890–1929

In July 1913, a large crowd gathered on the University of North Carolina (UNC) campus to witness the unveiling of a new monument to the school’s Confederate veterans. It was a momentous event with an estimated crowd of around one thousand people. The monument, which was the product of a joint effort by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the university, featured a decidedly young-looking soldier, representing a student heading off to war. The organizers spared no expense, spending the hefty sum of $7,500 to commission Canadian sculptor John A. Wilson to construct the monument. In fact, it had taken years for the UDC and the president of the university, Francis Venable, to raise the money, largely from alumni donations; in the end, it still took a loan from the university to secure the full amount to pay for the statue. Although inclement weather forced the speeches inside, the unveiling was a festive occasion, complete with flags and bunting, made more so by coinciding with Class Day as part of the university’s graduation ceremonies.1

In time, the statue would be known as “Silent Sam” and become a national news story, but in 1913, it had no nickname. Indeed, the origins of the nickname are unclear. One story goes that Sam was unable to shoot because his belt lacked a cartridge box. In another version, he was completely silent because he only shoots when a virgin walks by. The truth is, he had no cartridge box because the Canadian sculptor who cast Sam was unfamiliar with mid-nineteenth-century weaponry. In fact, he was never meant to be silent, and those who organized, funded, and dedicated the monument would be horrified at the thought that future generations would see Sam as a pacifist. Speeches given at the unveiling made explicit what the monument celebrated and what message Sam was meant to impart to the public: it was intended to remind viewers that those students who fought for the Confederacy were heroes of the white race. Indeed, the monument was meant, at least in part, to be an enduring testament to the success of white supremacy.

The speakers that day were a who’s who of the North Carolina elite. After an opening rendition of “Dixie,” Henry A. London—who, as a UNC student, had entered the Confederate army in 1865—spoke first. Although he was there to introduce the keynote speaker, North Carolina governor Locke Craig, London was himself a prominent figure in the monument-building movement and Democratic politics. He and industrialist Julian Shakespeare Carr, the other Confederate veteran speaking that day, already knew each other, likely from college. They were two of the leading Confederate veterans in the state; with London as his adjutant general, Carr commanded the state division of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), the largest Confederate veterans’ organization. They were longtime political allies in Democratic politics as well.2 London, who served as a state senator and ran a newspaper in Pittsboro, had been a messenger and aide for General Bryan Grimes in 1865, claiming to have carried the order to lay down arms to General William Cox’s troops at Appomattox. Later, he wrote extensively about the war, including a history of his unit, as well as giving numerous speeches at monument unveilings.3 Indeed, the unveiling ceremony at UNC mimicked most dedications between 1902 and 1926, the peak of Confederate monument building in civic spaces across North Carolina.

London’s wife, Bettie Jackson London, a prolific fund-raiser and a leading member of the UDC, also gave an address that day. Apart from the presence of Confederate veterans themselves, white women played a key role in the creation of the monuments, helping to preserve and promote a narrative of the past that celebrated Confederate soldiers. Karen Cox demonstrated in her groundbreaking work that after the UDC’s founding in 1894, the organization took increased leadership in advancing a Lost Cause version of the past and in so doing played a crucial role “in shaping the social and political culture of the New South.” Other historians have expanded on Cox’s work to examine how white women played central roles as guardians of Confederate memory and in spreading the gospel of the Lost Cause. The UDC and earlier women’s groups spent decades working to ensure that a narrative sympathetic to the Confederacy was retold and passed on. Indeed, women were largely responsible for the erection of these monuments.4 As the largest woman’s association dedicated to promoting a Lost Cause narrative of the war and erecting monuments, the UDC has had an outsized role in how we remember the past. In the case of UNC’s monument, Bettie London led the fund-raising campaign for the monument. Although Governor Craig gave the keynote oration, women participated at multiple central moments of the unveiling ceremony: Mary Hicks Williams, president of the North Carolina division of the UDC, gave a short address, while Bettie London presented the monument to President Venable, and a group of women did the actual unveiling.5

Unveiling of the Confederate monument at the University of North Carolina, June 2, 1913. (Courtesy of the North Carolina Postcard Collection, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill)

As white women “founded the Confederate tradition,” they did so with the veterans’ thanks and aid. Veterans served as “living monuments” alongside those in bronze and granite, and the survivors’ presence and words gave extra authenticity to the monuments. Ultimately, they provided members of the UDC legitimacy in their role as guardians of the past.6 No dedication was complete without a Daughter presenting the monument to a veteran with his grateful acceptance. In creating a narrative that made Confederate veterans heroic, white women were partners with veterans in protecting white southern masculinity.

At UNC, the last speaker of the day was Julian Carr, who, dressed in a military uniform, provided the “Thanks of the Student Veterans.”7 While white women exerted influence and power in their fund-raising and political activism, much of the raw material for their narrative of the war—especially those parts about battlefield heroics—came from the veterans themselves. Carr’s role as a veteran recounting war stories was not just about thanking the UDC but also about passing on tales of white men fighting valiantly to protect the very women who now guarded their memory. As scholars have pointed out, it was often “elite white men who wrote the books that articulated the Lost Cause,” which women then popularized.8 Confederate veterans entrusted southern white women with epic war stories to pass on to future generations, the topic of the next chapter.

The present chapter examines how leading politicians and white elites employed a fabricated past, including numerous lies and falsehoods, to celebrate and justify white supremacy around the turn of the twentieth century. In North Carolina, a series of increasingly vicious white supremacist campaigns run by Democrats in the 1890s culminated in 1900 with their takeover of the state government, the disenfranchisement of most African Americans, and the institution of one-party rule. Shortly thereafter, Confederate monuments increasingly began appearing in front of city halls, courthouses, and other public buildings. The correlation between the erection of such monuments and the success of the Democratic Party’s white supremacy campaigns was not coincidental. In 1868, after battlefield defeat and the subsequent political and social gains made by black North Carolinians, former Confederates had little to celebrate. By 1901, however, Reconstruction had been overturned and African Americans largely disenfranchised. Many former Confederates in North Carolina felt they had won a victory for the cause of white rule and finally “corrected” some of the war’s most disagreeable consequences.

Between 1890 and 1924, former-Confederates-turned-Democratic-leaders repeated the same basic historical narratives, littered with myth and exaggeration, at political and commemorative events. Though this narrative evolved over time—and new details were added—some core tenets of the Lost Cause had already formed in the decades after the war. Among the many fabrications repeated were that slavery was benevolent and beneficial, that Reconstruction—the era after the Civil War in which the South was reintegrated into the Union—was a period of corrupt rule driven by northern interference, and that there had existed a united white South, unanimously devoted to the Confederacy, during the war. This solid white South had supposedly remained committed to the cause of white supremacy ever since. Most significantly, by fabricating a history in which the Confederacy fought not for slavery but for states’ rights, Confederate mythmakers could claim a victory instead of a defeat. Combined with their victory in politics, this Lost Cause remembrance provided ex-Confederates a means to celebrate white supremacy through the presentation of Confederate soldiers as an epitome of white masculinity. These myths, partially premised upon lies, exaggerations, and spin, were directly tied to the 1890s campaigns for white supremacy in North Carolina and the subsequent erection of Confederate monuments.

These monuments and the narratives they evoked undermined parts of the war’s outcome by justifying and defending white hegemonic control of southern politics. While all historical narratives distort reality, the narrative that former Confederates propagated was not only especially egregious in its inclusion of overtly false aspects but was also specifically crafted in ways that allowed it to be used to uphold white supremacy. What makes the Lost Cause so relevant to contemporary history is not that it was heavily based on fabricated stories but that it shaped the twentieth century. The speeches and lives of the speakers at UNC in July 1913 clearly show how Confederate monuments, white supremacy, Jim Crow, and a distorted memory of the past were tied together. Far from “playing a limited role in modern southern culture,” as some historians argue, the proponents of the Lost Cause helped construct Jim Crow in North Carolina with both fabricated narratives and the physical colonization of public space in the early twentieth century, which in turn laid the foundation for all that has followed.9

Memories evolve. Today, when those wishing to preserve Confederate monuments say that these statues bear no connection to white supremacy, they are rejecting what many of those central to their erection had hoped future generations would learn from stone and bronze. Despite the frequent denunciation of overt white supremacist rhetoric, the narrative that neo-Confederate and other Confederate apologists promote is a direct descendent of the Lost Cause narrative that Confederate veterans created. Ironically, exaggerations, narrative arcs, tales, and falsehoods similar or identical to those that ex-Confederates used to justify white supremacy in 1913 are now used by monument supporters to try to detangle the Confederacy from accusations of racism. Moreover, despite assertions, many of which are no doubt sincere, by those who wished to maintain Silent Sam in a place of honor on UNC’s campus that the statute has “nothing to do with racism,” the narrative of history they advocate provides an explanation of the past that still helps reinforce and justify discrimination within American society.10 While the explicitness and self-awareness of the ties between celebrating the Confederacy and upholding white supremacy have changed, the connections—as well as many of the false anecdotes—remain in popular understandings of the war.

A native of Chapel Hill and UNC student, young Julian Carr joined the Confederate army in late 1864, serving during the last few months of the conflict. He made his fortune after the war with tobacco before diversifying into cotton mills. Though largely forgotten by the turn of the twenty-first century except as the namesake of the town of Carrboro, he was a giant in his time. An economic, political, and philanthropic leader, he served on the board of trustees for UNC and as chairman of the state’s Democratic Party. Like many white Southerners of his generation and ideological bent, Carr’s life was marked with seeming contradictions. A staunch racist, he nonetheless protected his mixed-race half-brother and donated funds to both white and black educational institutions.11

Despite his seeming kindness toward African Americans through donations and vocal assertions that he was their friend, Carr was a devoted white supremacist and member of the Ku Klux Klan.12 A leading donor and architect of North Carolina’s white supremacist politics in the Jim Crow era, Carr actively worked to segregate society and maintain a racial hierarchy. In the 1880s, he was already funding a newspaper for Randolph Shotwell, who had been pardoned by President Grant after being convicted for his leadership in North Carolina’s Ku Klux Klan. When Shotwell died, Carr essentially gave the paper to Josephus Daniels, later funding the purchase of additional newspapers for him, including the state’s paper of record, the News and Observer. With Carr’s backing, Daniels became a leading Democratic newspaperman, using the press to push white supremacist policies and politics before eventually becoming secretary of the navy.13 In 1900, Carr bragged that he had already spent $10,000 “in legitimate campaign expenses to carry white supremacy.”14 He supported white supremacy not only through his political activities and donations but also in the way he rewrote the past.

Carr’s public persona, as demonstrated in speeches, electoral campaigns, and philanthropy, heavily revolved around being a former Confederate soldier. He was known as “General Carr” because of his role as a leading Confederate veteran, not because of his wartime rank of private. In 1886, Carr helped found a forerunner of the UCV, the North Carolina Confederate Veterans Association, which worked to fund the state’s home for old soldiers. Elected to head the North Carolina Division of the UCV in 1899, he served in that role until 1915, when members promoted him to command the organization’s Department of the Army of Northern Virginia. In 1921 and 1922, the UCV’s members elected him to lead all ex-Confederates, making him the most senior Confederate veteran in the country.15 Being a former Confederate was pa...