Flannery O’Connor’s challenge to the Lost Cause myths of the Confederacy

Imagine that you or someone you know participated in or in some way enabled a horrific act of sustained brutality and that, in order to erase the memory of these misdeeds, you then attempted to convince others that what was done was in fact a heroic defense of a noble ideal. Imagine the extent you would go to in order to convince others that what you fought for was not a reason for penitence but rather a cause that God would vindicate. Imagine that this historical erasure was so thorough that many people came to believe your cause was morally pure. And imagine that you then built monuments to your self-deception and were able to convince others that these monuments were now a sacred part of the landscape of the very same nation that you sought to extricate yourself from.

This, arguably, is the logic behind the Lost Cause and its many monuments to the Confederacy—totems of a 150-year campaign to historically reimagine the meaning of the Civil War. The years from 1890 to 1920 marked the high point of this campaign, led by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and other groups which today protest “heritage violations” of their ongoing program of public commemoration. And they have not lost: Confederate revisionism, in the soft form of preservationism, as opposed to the blunt-force tactics of rallies and protests, is now the provenance of local, state, and even federal governments.

Two weeks after the Confederate battle flag was removed from statehouse grounds in Columbia, South Carolina, in July 2015, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a law protecting “monuments and memorials commemorating events, persons, and military service in North Carolina history.” Despite the apparent catholicity of its protections, the Cultural History Artifact Management and Patriotism Act was clearly aimed at granting asylum to Confederate monuments and memorials around the state, based on the notion that, as its proponents argued, to remove them from courthouse lawns and university quadrangles would be to “erase history.” The flag episode in Columbia was a catalyst for a storm of neo-Confederate protest, which intensified during the 2016 election cycle and came to a head at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. The sharp reaction against the Charlottesville rally did not mean that all was lost for the Lost Cause. Far from it.