scholarly journals Neo-Confederates take their stand: Southern Agrarians and the Civil War

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niall Munro
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Allen Tate ◽  
Temporal Shape ◽  
United States Today ◽  
Civil War Memory

Ninety years ago, a group of twelve Southern intellectuals published I’ll Take My Stand, a manifesto dedicated to reviving Southern values and ideals in direct opposition to Northern industrialism and philosophy. Ever since 1930, the Southern Agrarians have been frequently presented as critics of modern life, but this kind of focus overshadows another way in which they were described in those early days: as neo-Confederates. The Agrarians’ ongoing and wide-ranging engagement with the Civil War ‐ especially in the work of Allen Tate and Donald Davidson ‐ was, I argue, hugely significant for the planning and writing of the manifesto. Examining the ways in which these writers used the war also shows how they sought to retard modernist progress, embrace failure as an element of Lost Cause ideology, and distort the temporal shape of Civil War memory. Furthermore, I show here how bound up in the manifesto and related writing by its contributors is a commitment to white supremacy and violence ‐ a kind of fanatical dedication that speaks to events in the United States today.

The Blue-Gray Campaign

2021 ◽  
pp. 119-151
Author(s):  
Matthew E. Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Presidential Campaign ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Color Line ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Civil War Memory

This chapter investigates how Civil War memory informed the currents and contradictions of Populist thought. Populists painted themselves as neo-abolitionists fighting economic enslavement and combined antislavery vernacular with conceptions of modernity. Populism largely repudiated the Lost Cause. At the same time, the movement was profoundly shaped by the popular reconciliatory trends. This was especially true of the party’s 1892 blue-gray presidential campaign. While Populists attempted to circumvent North-South issues through class or vocational solidarity, regional and racial divisions proved ruinous. Though an effective and permanent coalition required the complete partnership of fully equal nonwhite laborers, Populist-style reconciliation often reinforced the color line even as it defied the Solid South and created new possibilities for Black political engagement.

A Divide to Heal the Union

2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (4) ◽  
pp. 409-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
James D. Drake
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Unity ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Continental Divide ◽  
Geographic Feature ◽  
Civil War Memory ◽  
History Of ◽  
North And South

This article traces the process by which people in the United States embraced the Continental Divide as a geographic feature of North America in the late 1860s. Building on recent work in environmental history, Civil War memory, geography, and the history of nationalism, the essay explains how accurate mapping alone did not reveal the Continental Divide. Instead, the divide’s conceptualization also depended on Americans’ history of thinking about the Rockies as a political boundary, southern secession, and the building of the transcontinental railroad. Many Americans found in that railroad’s construction solace for a nation recovering from the Civil War, and they cast themselves as conquering nature to unite the nation. Railroad boosters and passengers consecrated the Continental Divide as a symbol of national unity and an icon of obstacles overcome. In a nation trying to overcome its sectional division between North and South, aspirations for reunification formed a foundation for emphasizing the continent’s most prominent feature that separates East and West.

Epilogue

Abolitionism ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 128-134
Author(s):  
Richard S. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Civil War Memory ◽  
The U.S

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, American abolitionists began writing memoirs, histories, and reminiscences of the grand struggle for freedom. Part of a battle over Civil War memory, they sought not only to claim a piece of history but also to combat Lost Cause narratives that already denigrated emancipation. Even though American slavery was history, abolitionist battles continued. The epilogue describes how across the Atlantic world abolitionists realized that their struggle was not over. British abolitionists focused on the perils of illegal slave trading while Iberian and Latin American abolitionists renewed their struggle against bondage itself. In the U.S. South, abolitionists fought against new forms of discrimination that seemed very much like slavery.

The Civil War at the Dawn of the Great Depression

2018 ◽  
pp. 9-34
Author(s):  
Nina Silber
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Civil War Memory ◽  
The Us ◽  
Look Back ◽  
Us Civil War

This chapter explores why and how the Great Depression prompted Americans to look back at the US Civil War while also considering the type of Civil War memory Americans inherited from the 1920s. That memory continued to be slanted toward romantic stories of reconciliation and sentimental reflections on the Lost Cause, although some new influences – specifically the rise of modernism and a more visible and militant African American presence in art and politics – were also beginning to reshape the memory of the war.

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