Identity and tradition in the post-Civil War South

Abstract

The attempt to create a nation-state in the form of the Southern Confederacy was an act of political geography, induced by growing sectional identities and the forces of romantic nationalism. The crises which culminated in Civil War were associated with a reinterpretation of the Southern past, particularly of its role in the Revolution, and by the invention of a stereotypical Southerner. The military defeat of the Confederacy enhanced Southern identity rather than destroyed it. Monuments erected throughout the South, particularly statues of the Confederate soldier, can be interpreted as celebrations of the Lost Cause, a romantic version of the antebellum South. The peak years of monument unveilings were the first two decades of the twentieth century, fully two generations after the Southern surrender at Appomattox. The statues provide tangible evidence of the currency of the cult of the Lost Cause in the New South. Post-Civil War trends in Charleston, South Carolina, represent an extreme version of a cultural continuity evident throughout the diverse regions of the former Confederacy, and illustrate the persistence of the South as a distinctive geographical entity well into the present century.