Confederate statues are killing people right now. You don’t need me to tell you this—just ask any Black American. People are still suffering from the attacks of the “brilliant” Jackson. They are still being crushed by the “gallant” Lee. The Lost Cause is in everything from the low wages at the nearest coffee shop, to the excess of Black people dying from COVID-19. This is not an argument about remembering something that happened in the 19th century, or even the 20th. This is about defining who we are now.
The Southern cause is, and was, only ever about slavery. And slavery was only ever about greed. Even white supremacy is just a sideshow to that cause—a salve to excuse raw cruelty, abuse, and inhumanity toward fellow humans. Slavery didn’t happen because white men thought themselves superior. It happened because slavery was profitable. The myth of white supremacy was always there, always an excuse to repress and reject; to steal the effort and ideas of people of color. The convenience of that myth was that it justified the worst horrors, and enabled the most profit. And after the war, the Southern cause became just … the cause. America’s cause. Because white Americans decided it was easier to compromise with slavery than eradicate it. Easier, and far more profitable.
The connection between Donald Trump’s defense of 150-year-old traitors and the police murder of George Floyd isn’t a one-way street. It’s a gyre, one that spins around the settlement America made once it had ticked the moral high ground box by “defeating slavery.” That settlement came in the form of a permanent Black underclass; in an agreement that gave every white person a small share of the advantage slave-owning southerners enjoyed during antebellum.
Before the war, one southern family in three owned slaves. The other two accepted that, and fought for that, because they wanted to own slaves. Owning slaves wasn’t just a symbol of wealth: it was an engine of wealth. It was wealth. People who lived alongside slave owners accepted and aspired to slave ownership the same way that people admire billionaires today. We forgive them whatever ludicrously unfair breaks government provides, we ignore their odious behavior, we accept their mistreatment of workers and callous disregard for those without a ten-figure stock portfolio. We accept them, because we want to be them.
The idea that many of the memorialized Confederates did not actually support slavery is, and always has been, unpolished bullshit. The 200 slaves owned by Robert E. Lee were a major corporation that swept great riches into Lee’s pocket. Lee never for a moment made any calculation other than the best way to protect that engine of wealth. The whole idea that Lee, or Longstreet, or other southern generals sat around bemoaning the idea that they should have surrendered slavery to preserve the purity of “the cause” is pure revisionism. It’s not just putting words in their mouths, it’s placing completely alien thoughts in their heads. The cause was slavery. The open, stated, straightforward cause was conversion of human misery into profit. The southern states wrote this proudly into their articles of secession. Spoke it loudly in their organizing speeches. Every other “cause” was a post-facto fabrication.
Stately, soft-talking, “Marse Robert” Lee, portrayed in endless films and books, professing his love for his state, is also a man who regularly ordered the dispensation of 50 lashes to one of the prisoners in his cruelty engine “for the education of the race.” He loved Black people so much, he was willing to torture them until they were quiet cogs in his factory. Marse, Lee’s oft-used nickname, is a slang version of master.
It’s not that “kindly master” propaganda wasn’t in evidence decades before the war. There was. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had not been out a year before the market was flooded with rapid-response replies like Aunt Phillis's Cabin, populated by slaves who were Just so thrilled with their lives. Songs, poems, essays, and pamphlets were all deployed in the effort to preserve the southern profit center. That same effort—from minstrel shows to cotton songs to Birth of a Nation—was revived after the war to paper over both the real reason for the conflict and add a patina of false nobility to the most ignoble of causes.
After the war was in the rear view, the Lost Cause mythology did not remain the Southern story. It became the national story. It was taught in schools on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. It pervaded culture. Americans, north and south, bought into the lionization of men like Lee, and the romance of “the last cavaliers.” They erected Confederate statues in places where every soldier had been pro-union, and they did it for the same base reason that drove slavery in the first place: profit.
By buying into the idea that men like Lee were in some sense heroes, and that “state’s rights” was the source of conflict, the nation avoided looking at what slavery was really about. If the war was over state’s rights and not slavery, then … was the question of slavery really settled? Were the justifications for slavery not acceptable after all? Didn’t Robert E. Lee look very fine up there mounted on Traveler?
After the war, the profit from slavery was ground down fine, spread thin, and applied across the nation in the form of white privilege. Confederate revisionism made that possible, and it accomplished two things. First, it assured that even the lowliest white person would still have someone they could always look down upon. But even more importantly, it ensured the nation that there would always be cheap labor, poorly protected labor, labor whose safety, health, and intrinsic humanity could be disregarded. Black labor.
That settlement with slavery is what’s really memorialized in statues of Confederate figures. They’re not about actual history: They’re about the agreement the nation made to transform that history into something that was worth celebrating, for the purposes of profit. That’s the compromise. That agreement is the reason that Black Americans are dying at such a high rate from COVID-19. It’s the reason that Black Americans are in “essential” roles, but receive negligible pay and benefits. It’s the reason that George Floyd and so many others were treated as disposable men. It’s why American corporations can treat workers in ways that other nations find completely unacceptable, because we made a compromise that said the worst possible thing you can do to people isn’t so bad … as long as there’s money in it.
When Donald Trump champions the preservation of Confederate statues, it has nothing to do with distant events. It has to do with a deal that’s very much still in effect. “The past is not even past,” and never will be so long as that compromise is maintained.