Virginia First

If you listen to the Righteous Cause Lincoln Mythologists, the “Lost Cause” was invented after the War by evil Southerners eager to provide cover for their immoral war.

In other words, they lied.

Pushing this narrative has become a cottage industry for historically challenged individuals, from tenured professors and high school history teachers to YouTube amateurs who measure their impact by “views.”

Their entire narrative is, of course, based on their own selective reading of American history and influence by what Professor Susan Mary Grant titled, “North Over South.”

Who were the real liars?

Grant doesn’t care for the South or the Lost Cause, but she understands the power of propaganda and the overt attempt by Northerners to influence American education in the post-bellum period.

Southerners rejected Northern dominated education and preferred to offer their own view of the War and sectional conflict. Northerners call them “mythologists” and argue that they avoid historical “truths.”

But what “truths” are they missing? If you read Jefferson Davis in 1850 and compare that to Jefferson Davis in 1881, he said the same thing.

As did most Southerners writing about the War in the years after the conflict.

According to the Righteous Cause Lincoln Mythologists, these people just made it up as they went along to take the sting out of slavery.

But what about foreigners like G. K. Chesterton?

In 1920, Chesterton wrote an essay that sounds a lot like the “Lost Cause.”

Was he making this up? And more importantly, Chesterton pegged the problem to the Puritan and Pilgrim myth of the American founding.

You see, it all went back to the first myth of America, that the Pilgrims founded America in 1620 and America was based on New England culture.

Chesterton points out the abject stupidity in this assertion.

But of course this made for great Podcast fodder, so I talk about Chesterton’s essay on Episode 745 of The Brion McClanahan Show.