The myth of the Lost Cause has also been propagated through media, literature, and postwar propaganda. These fictions often have included denying that the war was ever about slavery, or depicting slavery as a benign or even mutually beneficial institution. On February 22, 1896, thirty-five years after Jefferson Davis’s inauguration as president of the Confederacy, former Confederate general Bradley T. Johnson explained that slavery was “the apprenticeship by which savage races had been educated and trained into civilization by their superiors.”
