The term "Lost Cause" is a reference to efforts on the part of former Confederates, especially Jubal Early, and Confederate sympathizers in the decades following the war to recast the meaning of the war, its causes, and reasons for the South's defeat. In the "Lost Cause" version, the Confederates fought for a noble, but doomed, cause. The role of slavery as the underlying cause of the war was completely written out of its narrative of the war and its causes. The South was doomed from the outset because of the North's superior manpower, resources, and industrial capacity. The leaders of the confederacy were noble, valiant, and in all ways superior to those of the Union. Hence, Davis, the statesman, was a man of principle; Lincoln was an unscrupulous politician who schemed to bring about a war in the interests of northern capitalists. Lee was a brilliant, inspiring, and humanitarian general who was never outgeneraled, even against vastly superior forces; Grant was a butcher without imagination who only ever prevailed by throwing his endless supply of soldiers at the enemy with no regard for the cost in lives. Emancipation itself was nothing but a cynical ploy by Lincoln that never freed a single slave. And, of course, the plight of the freedmen after the war was much harsher than it had been under the enlightened and benevolent paternalism of Southern slavery, which in reality was a mutually beneficial social arrangement that had been grossly mischaracterized by Northern abolitionists before the war, who, along with the scheming Northern capitalists, were the true villains of ante-bellum america. The Myth of the Lost Cause became the official ideology of white supremacy in the South, where the war was lost on the battlefield, but the cause was continued in the political, social, and economic arenas of white control over the black population. You see the fruits of this "Cause" with the legal segregation, disfranchisement, economic marginalization, and ongoing public violence of the "Jim Crow" era. The ultimate irony of the term "Lost Cause" is the persistent, and until the Civil Rights era successful, effort to win, through other means, the goals of the Confederacy.
