The Lost Cause

Kentucky is not the South as anyone who looks at a map knows; the fact that Indiana is a mile away across the Ohio River seemed to me when I was a child to prove that the state could never share in the myth so dear to my Richmond, Virginia grandmother: The Lost Cause, which presented the Civil War as being about gallantry, chivalry, and the smell of magnolias.

But loneliness is a powerful inducement to belief in myth, and as I begin reading the collection of nineteenth-century Stiles letters (from my mother’s blue box) that may provide the core of my next book, I’m brought reluctantly to remember two long ago incidents when loneliness pushed me closer to belief. It had already been fueled by my love of Sir Walter Scott (he would have to be a Sir!) and chivalry as he presented it in novels like Ivanhoe.

As I begin my dive into the history of the Deep South as experienced and interpreted by one privileged and educated white family, I began to look at the old movies that attempted in various ways to present the South: William Faulkner’s ravaged poor-white lives in As I Lay Dying, newer versions like To Kill A Mockingbird and The Help—but of course first of all Gone with the Wind—and I remembered being a lonely 12 year old in Paris, and drinking deep of that movie.

Now, looking at it again, I’m struck by how modern Scarlett seems, almost a caricature of what we feminists look for: ambition, grit—but also unfortunately meanness, especially toward a saintly rival.

When at twelve I devoured the novel, I was smitten by all the lost cause trappings: beautiful young men riding off to the slaughter as the knights in Ivanhoe rode to medieval battles, adoring attention paid to wasp-waisted beauties, and even a “Mammy” who wielded a certain limited authority.

Did I know, at twelve, that “The War,” as my grandmother always called it, was fought by the Confederacy to legitimize and perpetuate African American slavery?

Well, in theory, yes. But theory hardly protects against myth.

Many years later when in the course of another research project, I read my grandfather’s admiring letter to Margaret Mitchell, proclaiming her novel the best he’d ever read and a true representation of the South, I would have learned enough to be astonished by his enthusiasm—although as I grew in knowledge of this man, his enthusiasm came to be only part of the package.

Then, at seventeen, lonely and insecure in my Freshman year at college, depressed by the cold overcast winter in Boston and isolated in my single dorm room (my mother had insisted on that), I listened to the recording of the Broadway reading of Stephen Vincent Benet’s long narrative poem, “John Brown’s Body.”

I hardly noticed that the poem insists over and over that although Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, “His Truth is Marching On”—the truth of emancipation.

I was caught instead by the lost cause images; they almost brought me to tears:

“Fall of the possum, fall of the ‘coon,
And the lop-eared hound dog baying the moon,
Fall that is neither bitter nor swift
But a brown girl bringing an idle gift…”

It was years before I wondered, uneasily, what that idle gift might have been. By then the poem, published in 1928, had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and been produced on Broadway in 1953 with Tyron Power, Judith Anderson and Raymond Massey, stars of that day. This was the staged reading my father saw before buying me the record I listened to over and over in my dismal dorm room.

I am uncomfortable with my memory of my almost tears. And yet they may serve a purpose: as I read The Light of Other Days by Caroline Couper Lovell, a Stiles relative, published in 1995 “IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF THE COLONIAL DAMES OF AMERICA IN THE STATE OF GEORGIA”—the group that brought us the recently dethroned Confederate statues all over the south—and choke down her opinions such as that the “Negros” (she usually calls them servants not slaves) had “a much better time” than the white tenant farmers she calls “Crackers,” I recognize the usefulness of my long ago assimilation.

As in the estimable history, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World The Slaves Made Genovese is able to show the many facets of slaveowners that existed alongside their death-dealing racism, I hope to find in Caroline Clifford Nephew, later Stiles, a connection much more potent than blood.

She was my great-great-aunt. But blood to my mind does not have much meaning; generations have passed, the world she knew is long gone, and finally our ingrained attitudes are beginning to shift a little.

It is her link to slavery in Georgia and the myth that for so long seemed to justify it—and my long-ago enchantment by that myth.

But also: Caroline was a complex girl whose poem, written when she was fourteen at the Lafayette Female Academy in Lexington, Kentucky and presented to General Lafayette when he visited the school in 1824, shows her facility with words and her adherence to the myths of her class and her generation—but maybe much more.

Who knows? Surely I don’t at this early point. But it is the layers of mysteries, including some that are unsolvable, that make research so exciting.

In Kentucky, My Family The Stiles Letters The Lost Cause