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

by Ty Seidule

The next tenet of the Lost Cause myth dealt with defeat. If a southern man could whip twelve Yankees, as several of Mitchell’s characters proclaim repeatedly, then how could the South have lost? The cause was lost, doomed from the start, because the Yankees had more money, matériel, and manpower. The Yankee victory showed the triumph of might over right. The Appomattox surrender document still had wet ink when Lee gave General Orders No. 9, his farewell address, to the Army of Northern Virginia on April 10, 1865. Lee’s address was the first salvo in what would become a written battle to define the meaning of the war. He argued that his army surrendered only because it had been “compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.”53 Not only did the United States have more of everything; it had Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Mitchell writes, “Grant was a butcher who did not care how many men he slaughtered for a victory, but a victory he would have.”54 As for Sherman, Mitchell mentioned him seventy-two times, as though he carried a sulfurous pitchfork, leaving Sherman sentinels, the burned chimneys of plantation houses, in his wake. Only someone who fought without mercy and with unlimited resources of men and matériel could have defeated the virtuous Confederates. In reality, Grant and Sherman exhibited extraordinary generalship in a righteous cause. Despite the myth that the “cause” was always lost, the Confederates could have won the war. The South h...