-The day after Richmond fell, Abraham Lincoln came
to Richmond. He came to this house. General Weitzel says,
"Mr President, how should we
treat these people"? And Lincoln says,
"Let 'em up easy". -Richmond, Virginia, was the
capital of the Confederacy and that's kinda hard to miss, considering all of the monuments
to Confederate war heroes
throughout the city. It is very rare for the losing
side of a war to have monuments. -Guess what else is real rare
in world history? The whole way we ended
the Civil War. -But those statues take on
a really charged feeling for people. -We have a clash around memory
and heritage and what it means, with regard
to the American Civil War. -Civil wars usually end
with the losers goin' to the hangman's noose,
the guillotine, to prison,
to exile, or somethin', and, in this case,
they just went home. -In America today,
almost half the country believes that the Civil War
was about states' rights, but the historical record shows that the Civil War
was about slavery. I talked to Waite Rawls,
the former president of the Museum of the Confederacy
to get some answers. -Was slavery the principal cause
of that political dispute? Yeah!
Yeah! There's no way to deny that. But to say "Confederacy's"
synonymous with "racist" is to connote,
"And nobody else was and they were all
by themselves in that". 99% of the white people
living in the United States in 1860 were racist,
including Abraham Lincoln. -Initially, Lincoln was not in
favor of giving Blacks voting rights,
or allowing them to hold office, or even intermarry with whites. Eventually, he did make
incredible steps forward, in terms of equal rights,
like the Thirteenth Amendment and the Freedmen's Bureau Bill. But his main priority,
at the time, was keeping the Union together. So, he also pardoned all
the Confederates and vetoed legislation
banning slavery altogether. Back then, white supremacy
was the nation's prevailing social order
throughout all of the Union. -Another side of reconciling is, "We gotta push those African
Americans out of the way. They're in the way to the
national reconciliation of the white North
and the white South". That gives ground for the
Lost Cause, politically, which was,
"We couldn't have been wrong. We simply must have been
outnumbered". -The Lost Cause was a national
propaganda campaign to misrepresent what the
Civil War was actually about. The main tenets
of the Lost Cause are that the Confederacy
was fighting for states' rights, not slavery; that slaves
had great working conditions, were loyal to their masters, and often fought
for the Confederacy. Portraying slave owners
as kind and Southerners, in general, as more steeped
in Christian values in order to make the case
that they were fighting for a just cause and only lost
because they were outnumbered. -It is a reflection of a need
for Southerners to reconcile their grief
over significant losses: the total disruption,
initially, of their social order
of white supremacy, whether you were
slaveholding or not. -But, how did we get
to a point where a propaganda campaign
became American history? -General Moore, at 99, follows
the heroic debt of the South to a soldier's grave
in Selma, Alabama, as the last tiny handful
of the boys in gray prepares for the final
Confederate reunion in Norfolk, Virginia. -The women, who are most
responsible for this, did an extraordinary job. -A lot of the Lost Cause
narratives can be traced back to funerals
for Confederate soldiers and the women they left
behind after the war. Women all over the South started
creating memorial associations to collect the bodies
of Confederate soldiers, properly bury them, and create monuments
to their fallen heroes. One of the most
prominent groups was the Confederate
Memorial Literary Society. -They send out a call
to prominent white women throughout the South and say, "We have to preserve the legacy
of our loved ones," and they open up what they call
the Confederate Museum and it is a hit. -It was a shrine. It was a shrine
to the Confederacy. -Each room of the house
was set up with these artifacts from each of
the Confederate states. But it's only their story. If Black folk are represented, it's because they're the loyal,
loving slave, supposedly. -One of the
underrepresented stories of the American Civil War
is the US colored troops. At the end of the war,
there were more Black men in blue uniforms
than white men in gray uniform. People need to know that! -We have completely removed
Black people from the narrative, when they were central to it. -The Lost Cause made its way
into popular culture, through films like "Birth of a Nation"
and "Gone with the Wind". -Your ma said the Confederacy
needs us, so we's gonna dig for the South. Don't worry.
We'll stop them Yankees! -Goodbye, Big Sam.
Goodbye, boys. -And, eventually, found its way
into school textbooks, and even legislation. -This group has nothing
to do with discrimination
that Congress prohibits. Nor do they advocate
radical positions. -1910, they make the decision
that, "Hey, no more textbooks that speak
ill of the Confederacy". And that persists until today,
in some places. -In 2018, Christy and Waite
decided to merge their museums to provide a more accurate
picture of the Civil War, from multiple perspectives. -What you want is for people to form their own perspective,
fully informed. -What's the harm in people
not knowing the Lost Cause? -The harm comes when there is
a disrespect for dignity of life that becomes sort
of generational because it's grounded
in a series of lies. -The history has never been
about the dead people, really. It's always about us
and the moment that we're in and the issues
we're trying to contemplate and wanting to understand
sort of this connective tissue. It's always been that. -DO you feel like Richmond
is going through its own sort of truth
and reconciliation process through these
challenging discourses, disagreements,
and representations of the city? -I think Richmond is going
through a period of awakening. The only way that you really
can come to some form
of conciliatory behavior is when everybody
finally understands it and has a desire to move forward
in a more equitable way. This is what we do in museums. The challenge is helping people
build new memories, so they can create
a more accurate heritage. -The American experiment
was a huge advance into somethin' very, very new. And they called it
an experiment all the time. We need to continue calling it
an experiment, which means
that it can get better, if we keep working at it.
