In January 1872, in Lexington, Virginia, on the campus of the recently renamed Washington and Lee University, a former Confederate lieutenant general named Jubal Anderson Early stood before a large crowd. His purpose was not merely to honor Robert E. Lee. It was to give the defeated South a positive narrative of its loss, and to arm his contemporaries and their descendants with what he and his followers called the true story of the war.
That day marked a crucial step in the creation of an ideology that still burns today: the Lost Cause. Early was the living embodiment of Confederate defiance. A man Lee himself called his “bad old man,” Early had not been chastened by defeat. Born in rural Virginia, the third of ten children, he entered West Point in 1833, where he showed academic brilliance and poor conduct in equal measure.
He served in the Seminole, Cherokee, and Mexican wars before leaving the army in the 1850s to practice law. In 1861, the conservative Whig voted against secession at Virginia’s convention, representing a tobacco region with commercial ties to northern markets. But he believed the federal government had no right to send troops into Virginia without state permission, and he chose the Confederacy. He led the 24th Virginia Infantry to war, earned rapid promotions, and was respected but rarely loved.
Given command of a corps in May 1864, he was tasked with defending the Shenandoah Valley. He did more than defend. With no more than 14,000 men, he cleared the valley of federal forces and threatened Washington itself, though he lacked the strength to take the city. He found comfort in saying that while he had not captured Washington, he had frightened Abraham Lincoln badly.
By October 1864, however, his force had been virtually annihilated by Major General Philip Sheridan, who burned the valley the Confederates called their breadbasket. Lee, in a rare act, relieved Early of command in March 1865. The timing spared Early the humiliation of surrender at Appomattox. Learning of Lee’s capitulation, he fled west, then chose voluntary exile rather than live under what he called the damned Yankees.
From Mexico, Early corresponded with his old adversary Sheridan, disputing casualty figures. Sheridan claimed Early had lost nearly 27,000 men; Early insisted his force never exceeded 14,000, so such losses were impossible. His numbers were in fact more accurate, and in his view they preserved the honor of his outnumbered Confederate soldiers. But winning the argument was a means to a greater end: writing a historical record meant to educate present and future generations.
In Canada, he published his own version of the Second Valley Campaign in 1866, titled A Memoir of the Last Year of the War for Independence in the Confederate States of America. This biased 125-page account was the first printed narrative by a southern general, and it was the first of many. Early had long recognized the power of the printed word. On Christmas Day 1868, President Andrew Johnson issued a blanket pardon to all former Confederate leaders, and Early returned to Virginia, settling in Lynchburg to resume his law practice.
He was not defeated, however. He always wore Confederate gray, maintained his unapologetic stance, and made it his life’s mission to keep the memory of the Confederacy alive. His old chief helped launch his campaign. In November 1865, Lee had written to Early, hoping to write a history of the Army of Northern Virginia but lacking the official records lost during the retreat from Richmond to Appomattox.
Lee asked Early for troop numbers in the major battles between May 1864 and April 1865, writing that his sole object was to convey the truth to posterity and do justice to their brave soldiers. In March 1866, Lee requested statistics on numbers and federal destruction of private property, noting that it would be difficult to make the world understand the odds they had fought against. He added that the public mind was not yet ready to receive the truth. Three months after receiving Lee’s first letter, Early completed the draft of his wartime memoir.
Lee’s letters likely served as a blueprint. Early also wrote to Lee in late 1868, urging him not to abandon writing the history of the army. He wrote that all that was left to them was the history of the struggle, and it should be written accurately, for they had lost almost everything except honor, and honor must be sacredly preserved. Early also sought to protect his own reputation.
He warned fellow officers to be vigilant in correcting printed versions of the war, because, as he said, they all knew how difficult it was to erase first impressions. That became his motto for the final twenty-five years of his life. Early’s most powerful tool was his leadership of the Southern Historical Society and its papers. Many historians have noted his strong presence in both; he became the leading authority on Confederate military history.
He orchestrated the historical assassination of James Longstreet, who had dared to criticize Lee in print. If Early could destroy a fighter of Longstreet’s caliber, no one felt safe disagreeing with the record of Lee. As former Confederate artillery officer Robert Stiles wrote, as long as the old hero lived, no one dared write a line about the great conflict without fear of Jubal Early. Between 1866 and 1872, Early’s main points were clear: Lee was the war’s greatest and most admirable general; Confederate armies faced overwhelming odds and resisted heroically; Ulysses S.
Grant was no match for Lee as a soldier; Stonewall Jackson deserved a place in the Confederate pantheon, but behind Lee; and Virginia was unquestionably the most important theater of the war. When Lee died in October 1870, Early was devastated. Weeks later, he and determined veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia met in Richmond at a Presbyterian church. Angry at being excluded from the funeral in Lexington and at the choice of that small Shenandoah town as Lee’s burial site, they created the Lee Monument Association.
The group insisted the principal monument to their commander belong in Richmond, where it would be accessible to all his men. A rival association existed in Lexington, and an attempt was made to bridge the divide: Early was invited to speak at Washington and Lee University on Lee’s birthday. That was January 19, 1872. Before that large crowd, Early highlighted the issues he and his old commander had discussed in their correspondence.
He repeatedly cited the brute force of the North and praised Lee and his brave soldiers in their struggle against a mighty industrial power. Lee had not been defeated in battle, Early insisted; he had surrendered only because he no longer had an army. What surrendered was the mere shadow of the Army of Northern Virginia, exhausted by the combined factors of numbers, steam power, railroads, machinery, and all the resources of physical science. He appealed to his audience not to turn their backs on the graves of fallen heroes, but to preserve the memory of their deeds and ensure justice for their memory.
He urged veterans to hold fast to the sacred memories of their glorious, though unsuccessful, struggle. Turning to the women present, he expressed confidence that they would continue to honor the brave dead, strew flowers on their graves, and instill feelings of honor and patriotism in the hearts of rising generations, teaching them to revere those who fell in defense of their homes. He insisted that Lee stood as the towering pillar of Confederate memory. He called for the proper adornment of Lee’s tomb and for a monument in the capital of the Confederacy, declaring to all ages that the soldiers who fought under Lee remained faithful to him even in death.
When Early returned to his seat, he had launched two powerful movements that were essentially one: the rise of the Lee cult and the birth of the Lost Cause. The term itself was not new, having first appeared in the title of an 1866 book by Edward A. Pollard, editor of the Richmond Examiner: The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. But Early’s writings and speeches of the 1870s breathed life into the movement, which became a long-lasting literary and cultural phenomenon.
The pillars of the Lost Cause included the belief that Confederate generals like Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Stonewall Jackson embodied southern nobility and fought with courage and integrity, while northern generals like Sherman and Sheridan had low moral standards for their treatment of southern civilians. Grant was portrayed as a butcher who sent waves of Union soldiers to their deaths. Jefferson Davis argued in his 1881 book that slavery had been a benevolent institution, with loyal slaves content until northern seducers corrupted them. Southern soldiers were said to have fought not for what they thought was right, but for what they knew was right.
Defeats were blamed on the North’s superiority in resources, or on betrayal by one of Lee’s subordinates, most often Longstreet at Gettysburg. The Lost Cause championed states’ rights instead of slavery as the cause of the war, presenting secession as a justified constitutional response to northern aggression. Early’s 1872 address was widely distributed as a pamphlet and remains a classic document of the Lost Cause. He defended Lee diligently, blaming Gettysburg on subordinates, denouncing Grant as a butcher, and ignoring the western theater except to explain Confederate failures in Virginia.
Scholars note that many Lost Cause premises rested partly on facts: Lee was a gifted soldier, Confederate forces did face severe disadvantages, and many contemporaries viewed Virginia as the decisive arena. Distortions arose when Early and his followers denied that Lee had any flaws, exaggerated northern advantages, denied Grant any merit, and ignored the rest of the Confederacy. The Lost Cause gained wide acceptance in the nineteenth century and persisted into the twenty-first. It was promoted in the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, in the 1930s by Douglas Southall Freeman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography R.
E. Lee, and in countless other works. Scholars who challenged the myth faced fierce attacks from loyalists. Modern historians broadly agree that secession was driven by slavery, that enslaved people were not content, and that states’ rights served as a cover for protecting the institution of slavery.
The Lost Cause, as historian Charles Reagan Wilson argued, took on religious dimensions, helping white southerners justify and explain their defeat. Politicians exploited it during Reconstruction, and southern women played a prominent role in memorializing Confederate dead through organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The controversy remains alive. In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in Walker v.
Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans that Texas could reject a proposed specialty license plate featuring the Confederate battle flag. Historians continue to attack the myth, while defenders, such as the Kennedy brothers in their 1991 book The South Was Right, continue to promote it. Yet the Lost Cause still dominates popular thought, a national rather than merely regional phenomenon.
The wounds of the war, it seems, continue to bleed.