False Causes and New Narratives

The Monument Wars that were sparked in 2015—largely by the aftermath of the Charleston Massacre—had, for a brief moment, dissipated. Then, with the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, the resurgence of Black Lives Matter campaigns has brought newer, sharper magnifying glass to the many monuments dotting the American landscape that honor the Confederacy and Southern variants of white supremacy. Monuments that generations of Southerners, Black and white, walked by or venerated have suddenly come down. Whether through the actions of local governments or strident protesters, the Southern landscape seems a bit different—in both a physical and memorial sense. Adam Domby’s The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory offers further reason why so many activists have good reason to oppose these monuments.

The question of why so many Confederate monuments dot the landscape is one that several historians have dealt with via deft scholarship and an eye towards linking the late 19^th century need to buttress white supremacy with justifying, despite its eventual defeat, the rise of the Confederate States of America. Historians such as Karen Cox, Charles Reagan Wilson, David Blight, Ethan Kytle, and Blain Roberts, among others, have written about the creation of the “Lost Cause” narrative in the American South after the Civil War. This narrative included a physical component—the erecting of numerous monuments honoring a glorified version of the South. This version, somehow, does not include slavery or, really, any place for Black Americans within its narrative. One of the strongest elements of Domby’s monograph is that he makes it quite clear that the Lost Cause narrative, and the erecting of Confederate monuments in North Carolina, was explicitly based on trying to build a durable, lasting, and useful white supremacy to safely push North Carolina away from the brief experiments with biracial rule and a modicum of liberty for Black Americans. Domby is quite blunt in his assessment of what it took to craft this Lost Cause narrative: “This book details how white supremacy, fraud, and fabricated memories have fundamentally shaped how Americans, especially white southerners, recalled the past” (3).

One of the strengths of Domby’s argument is that he does not just rely on the history of erecting Confederate monuments—he also seeks to showcase how this Lost Cause thinking permeated so many parts of North Carolina’s society, government, and politics. In North Carolina, memory had to be politicized in a certain way: “…Democrats in the state had the greatest need for a unifying narrative to attract white voters, and the state had the most to forget about the war” (5). Domby’s narrative returns to this key argument time and again. Politics and memory always mix, a lesson that was learned by those who opposed these Lost Cause memories in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and continues to be remembered today by the ideological descendants of those anti-Lost Causers.

The need to glorify and maintain white supremacy took on various forms in North Carolina. Indeed, Domby’s book is a wonderful example of how historians can trace mutating ideas of a certain form of civil religion into different spheres of public life. One of the chapters that makes this case in a somewhat surprising way is chapter 3, on how North Carolina’s pension system for Confederate veterans of the Civil War even included people who deserted the fight. As is the case throughout the book, North Carolina’s own divided home front during the conflict provides ample reason for the state to try to present a different narrative decades after the fact. People who didn’t serve in the Confederacy—or did serve and deserted during the war—were awarded pensions because such payments “helped united southern whites politically around racial lines by ensuring that wartime enmities and memories of divided communities were not passed on to future generations” (77). This point is important for two reasons: one, it helps to show the lengths to which the Lost Cause was built over time by Southern state governments; but two, it also cautions us against blindly conflating “southern” with “Confederate.” Such a rhetorical mistake, ironically, plays right into the hands of those who extol the virtues of a Lost Cause narrative of the history of the American South.

Southerners—white and Black—had to be convinced of the accuracy of the Lost Cause. If they were not, their concerns had to be ignored and washed away, ensuring that when people thought of “the South,” they thought of a region with a certain history and a certain viewpoint of the world. Many people in North Carolina opposed the rise of a Lost Cause ideology that shone through the state’s statues, laws, and public recollections of the past. North Carolina’s Republican Party, Domby shows time and again in The False Cause, opposed Lost Cause monuments. Black Americans constantly called into question the historical inaccuracy of these monuments, rightly understanding them to be ideological weapons for the war over political and cultural strength in North Carolina.

That The False Cause was released and has gained so much attention with the debate over monuments intensifying makes sense, as the origins of the book itself have to do with the fight over the “Silent Sam” memorial on the campus of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Yet I suspect the book will be useful for years to come, both as a primer to think about the crafting of the Lost Cause narrative, and to spark deeper discussions about how communities shape—and reshape—public memory for political, social, and cultural causes.