Race and Reunion

This unofficial Congressional compromise ended Reconstruction in the South by allowing federal troops to be removed from the former Confederate states. This action eliminated protection for Black southerners, leading to the rise of the Jim Crow South. As a result, Black people were disfranchised, and the domestic terrorist and white supremacist organization, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), intimidated, terrorized, and murdered Black Americans.

Emancipation refers to the liberation of enslaved Black people in the United States. Slave owners could choose to emancipate enslaved peoples, but emancipation technically and legally occurred through The Emancipation Proclamation, which President Abraham Lincoln issued on January 1, 1863. The proclamation, however, only applied to rebellious southern states and did not affect slavery in border states that were loyal to the Union or southern areas over which the Union had reassumed control. Slavery was officially abolished with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which states that enslavement will not exist except as punishment for convicted criminals. Emancipationist memory of the Civil War acknowledged that slavery was the war’s primary cause, unlike reconciliationist and white supremacist perspectives.

The Lost Cause is a myth crafted by Southerners and Northern reconciliationists in the decades following the Civil War. It is a “grassroots partisan history” (259) that ignores slavery as the war’s root cause and suggests that both sides of the conflict fought with similar courage. Proponents of the Lost Cause ideology suggest that slaves were well treated and loyal to their enslavers. Through rituals of memorial, the erection of statues, the authoring of memoirs, and the creation of history texts, Southerners, including veterans and their descendants, articulated this myth that gained acceptance among many Northerners who wanted to quickly reunite the country.