Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

The “Lost Cause” refers to the representation of the Confederacy as a noble, tragic effort to defend the Southern way of life. As depicted in texts like Gone with the Wind, the antebellum South was an agrarian paradise filled with dashing gentlemen, beautiful ladies, and contented enslaved people. In this telling, the US instigated the war to replace this system with industrial “wage slavery,” and the South fought valiantly until the overwhelming numbers and production capacity of the US steamrolled them. Their defeat marked the passing of a golden age, and therefore those who fought to preserve it are worthy of honor.

Seidule believes that certain commonly used words help to embed particular meanings of history, and therefore merit examination. A chief example is the term “plantation,” the large farms of the antebellum South. To this day, the term connotes class and elegance, a place for fabulous dinner parties and mint juleps on a wraparound patio. Seidule believes this to be an example of whitewashing the horrors of slavery to highlight the purported charm of the old Southern way of life, and to correct this he insists on calling them “enslaved labor farms” so that their primary association is with the chain and the lash.