19th Century spin doctors

The other night I saw something interesting on CSPAN. It was about the Civil War era of United States History. As this historian talked, he shared about the Lost Cause Writers of the American South that were the spin doctors of the Civil War for the South. In particular, he was often answering questions about the character of US Grant, who later became the President. Both in his presidency and in his military career, Lost Cause writers tried to disparage Grant as "a drunk and a butcher". In fact, Lee ended up having a higher casualty rate, and Grant by most accounts was not the drunk that the Lost Cause writers and tabloids made him out to be. Nor was his presidential administration as corrupt--this was another way of the Southern former slaveholding elite tried to disparage him.

There is much more about the lost cause writers that is notable, including the attempt to spin all of the civil war around states rights and minimize the importance of slavery as an issue in the civil war. All and all, this account was very interesting.

Some of the main tenets of the Lost Cause movement were that:

• 
  Confederate generals such as Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson represented the virtues of Southern nobility, as opposed to most Northern generals, who were characterized as possessing low moral standards, and who subjected the Southern civilian population to such indignities as Sherman's March to the Sea and Philip Sheridan's burning of the Shenandoah Valley in the Valley Campaigns of 1864.
• 
  Losses on the battlefield were inevitable due to Northern superiority in resources and manpower.
• 
  Losses were also the result of betrayal and incompetence on the part of certain subordinates of General Lee. (The Lost Cause focused mainly on Lee and the eastern theater of operations.)
• 
  Defense of States' rights, rather than preservation of chattel slavery, was the primary cause that led eleven Southern states to secede from the Union, thus precipitating the war.
• 
  Secession was a justifiable constitutional response to Northern cultural and economic aggressions against the Southern way of life.