19. The Bursting of the South’s Bubble Gave Rise to the Lost Cause Myth
Confederate perspectives on the role of slavery in the Civil War began to change only after the conflict, when they had been defeated, the Confederate States of America were no more, and their bubble had been forcibly burst. It was only then that most Southerners were finally exposed to the opinion and moral judgment of the outside world about slavery. So they turned around and invented a revisionist history myth, the “Lost Cause”, in which they brazenly came up with retroactive justifications for fighting the war on grounds other than slavery.
It worked for many years, and until relatively recently, Lost Cause peddlers were not challenged and called out for the brazen claim that the war had not been about slavery. In reality, the Confederates seceded because of slavery, plain and simple. Anything else was secondary to that. Other than slavery, there was no subject of disagreement between North and South strong enough to go to war over. Credible historians and scholars do not dispute that slavery was the key reason why the Civil War was fought. Today, only willful ignorance, coupled with intellectual dishonesty, explains the false assertions that the South had not fought for slavery.
