When scholars of religion refer to myth, they do not mean to imply a falsehood. The Lost Cause culture religion manifested all three. Major components of religion include myth, symbol, and their expressions through rituals. The term culture religion refers to ideals that a given group of people desire to strengthen or restore, and Lost Cause religion sought to maintain the concept of a distinct, and superior, white southern culture against perceived attacks. When the idea of a southern nation was defeated on the battlefield, the vision of a separate southern people, with a distinct and noble cultural character, remained. The argument of the Lost Cause insists that the South fought nobly and against all odds not to preserve slavery but entirely for other reasons, such as the rights of states to govern themselves, and that southerners were forced to defend themselves against northern aggression. As Georgian Clement Evans, a war veteran, put it, “If we cannot justify the South in the act of Secession, we will go down in History solely as a brave, impulsive but rash people who attempted in an illegal manner to overthrow the Union of our Country.” The assertion of the Lost Cause was the solution.Ĭourtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries. The Lost Cause concept supplied a heroic interpretation of the war so that southerners could maintain their sense of honor. Pollard and his postwar books, including The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (1866). Many scholars attribute the term to the Virginia journalist Edward A.
The term Lost Cause is not a modern invention but was used by southerners immediately after the war. Historians refer to this as Lost Cause religion, which was interdenominational and functioned as a culture religion. In a way, this was an apt comparison, for what the women in Columbus were engaged in was no less than a new form of southern religion. Thirty years later one of the Columbus women compared their work to that of Mary Magdalene and the other women who came to Christ’s grave. One of them, Lizzie Rutherford, proposed an annual observance to decorate graves, inaugurating Confederate Memorial Day. Near the end of the Civil War (1861-65), women from Columbus began to care for soldiers’ graves.
0 kommentar(er)
