How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

One of the most egregious features of the Lost Cause is the dramatic about-face that occurred after the war. When the war ended, the leaders of the Confederacy attempted to walk back or completely deny the centrality of slavery to the formation of the Confederacy. In 1881, two decades after his farewell speech to Congress, Jefferson Davis published a history of the Confederacy claiming that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War and that there would have been a civil war even if no American ever owned a slave. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, maintained that the explicit rhetoric in his infamous 1861 Cornerstone Speech, in which he stated that slavery was “the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution” and the Confederacy was founded on “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man,” had in part been newspapers misquoting him. The reporters’ notes of the event, taken contemporaneously and published widely, he said, “were very imperfect.” There is no shortage of documentation demonstrating that the Southern states seceded and began sowing the seeds of war in order to defend slavery. To look at primary source documents and convince yourself that the central cause of the war was anything other than slavery requires a remarkable contortion of history.