Ghosts of the Confederacy Quotes

“Memorial activities during the first two decades after the war increased the importance of the voice of the Confederate dead—gave authority to the ghosts of the Confederacy. But the South had not yet decided who would speak for the ghosts of the Confederacy and to what larger purpose.”
― Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913

“Dolly Blount Lamar of Macon, Georgia, remembered as a little girl spending Sunday afternoons in the local graveyard with her father who “would read [her] the tombstone inscriptions and discourse on the dead with considerable pomp and oratory.”13”
― Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913

“As the first cultural expression of the Confederate tradition, the memorial movement began the process in which southerners interpreted the meaning and implications of defeat. Throughout the region, communities created cemeteries, erected monuments, and established a memorial day for the Confederate dead. These activities honored the dead and their cause, placed distance between the Confederacy and the daily lives of southerners, but also offered a vague hope of its future vindication. In the process, the memorial movement helped to ensure that the Confederate dead became powerful cultural symbols within the New South—gave power, in other words, to the ghosts of the Confederacy.”
― Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913

“Faced with defeat, they judged their actions against their consciences and ruled themselves righteous.”
― Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913

“Indeed, many defeated Confederates consoled themselves that all had been lost save honor. Certainly, most wanted and needed to believe that was the case. Yet the code of honor in the Old South had made personal bravery and oath-taking central to a male’s status.”
― Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913

“Calls for federal compensation for their freed slaves suggested that such confidence was not simply braggadocio in the face of the Yankees. Southerners still sincerely believed slavery a matter of property rights, not the immoral expropriation of the life and labor of another human being.7”
― Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913