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THE LOST CAUSE:
REMEMBERING A FAILED
NATION
Robert E. Lee looked out upon his defeated army at Appomattox and knew he
needed to send them a fi nal message. While each Confederate soldier had an indi-
vidual memory, Lee started shaping their collective memory with the last order he
gave to his army. In Lee’s farewell address to his troops, he explained the defeat
of his army—an explanation that resonates today in many Americans’ minds. Lee
contended that his army “after four years of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed
courage and fortitude . . . has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers
and resources.” While partly this represented a way of justifying the surrender, it will
become enshrined as the fundamental explanation for defeat and the beginning of
the notion that the Confederate military eff ort was more admirable than the Union
eff ort. If Fort Sumter was the fi rst shot of the war, this was the fi rst shot in the battle
for Civil War memory. Robert Penn Warren refl ected on the legacy of the Civil War
100 years later and pinpointed Appomattox as critical to the confederacy’s legacy.
“We may say that only at the moment when Lee handed Grant his sword was the
Confederacy born; or to state matters another way, in the moment of death the
Confederacy entered upon its immortality.” Surprisingly, it was neither Lee, nor any
other soldier, but a civilian who coined the term “Lost Cause” to encapsulate Con-
federate Civil War memory. Edward A. Pollard, who edited the Richmond Examiner ,
published a book in 1866 entitled Th e Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War
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