(soft music)
You might believe in destiny, but if you ask me,
and I'm glad you did, there is one powerful force
that drives human behavior and changes the world.
Money.
(dramatic music) (coins jingling)
(slow harmonica music)
As a New Jersey high school student in the early 1980s,
I learned all about the lost cause of the Civil War.
It was this tragic struggle,
brother between brother, all fought
to preserve something very important called states' rights.
It was replete with gallantry and heroism,
and it had some really great fiddle tunes.
It wasn't until later that I thought to ask the question,
a state's right to do what, exactly?
Well, as it turned out,
it was the right to treat other human beings as cattle,
to buy and sell them, to beat them
and kill them and rape them.
Also, they could, as Lincoln put it,
wring their bread from the sweat of another's brow.
(slow symphonic music)
But why was I born a century
after the war taught a false history about it?
Why did my Northern school teach me the Southern myth?
How come instead of Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass,
I got Rhett and Scarlett?
(crowd yelling) (fire crackling)
In technicolor, even catastrophe is glorious.
Margaret Mitchell's husband, seeing rebel extras stretching
to the horizon as Atlanta burned
on the RKO back lot remarked,
"If we had had that many soldiers, we would have won!"
This has started to be a story that the South told
about themselves, within living memory
of the people who had died.
Yeah, and it certainly played well among them,
but also, part of that narrative
was also the reason you lost is not because you were lesser.
Correct.
In fact, you were superior.
You had more nobility, more honor, more courage.
You only lost 'cause the other side was just
so overwhelmingly huge.
It's giant.
It's all
this industrial machine. Yeah, I've heard of it.
The industrial North crushed the poor agrarian, yet,
and amazing how they fought given their lack of resources.
They get super props for going down valiantly
and so forth, and then the other part of that is
that it wasn't about slavery, but by the way,
slavery wasn't all that bad.
Right.
(peaceful music)
Nothing says it better than the prologue
to "Gone With the Wind."
There was a land of Cavaliers
and Cotton Fields called the Old South.
Here Gallantry took its last bow.
Here was the last of Master and Slave.
♪ Swing low, sweet chariot ♪
♪ Coming for to carry me home ♪
Slave plantations weren't
the last outpost of chivalry.
They were America's first big business.
Take free labor, add a global demand for textiles,
and you've got an industrial behemoth.
(banjo music)
You can follow the money, from consumer,
to meal, to planter, who used it to buy more slaves.
In the words of one fugitive slave, when the price
of cotton rises in the English market,
the poor slaves are harder driven,
(whip cracks) and the whip is kept constantly going.
(whip cracks)
By 1860, the South was wealthier
than any European country except England.
And it was all thanks to King Cotton.
(upbeat country music)
♪ Oh, Dixie, the land of King Cotton ♪
♪ Well, the home of the brave and the free ♪
♪ A nation by freedom begotten ♪
♪ The terror of despots to be ♪
They were fighting for slavery,
because slavery was basically the engine
of the entire Southern economy, right?
Right, and also, the Southern identity.
So, you have about 1/3 of Southern families,
in what becomes a confederacy, own slaves,
so it's a pretty substantial number,
and then of that 2/3 that don't own,
there's certainly a very large proportion who aspire to.
They weren't there yet, but they hoped
in 10 or 20 years they may do what successful people do,
which is to own slave labor.
So there's that aspiration, and then,
there's also just the value, that sort of intangible value
of white supremacy, which is that no matter how poor I am
as a white farmer or a white mechanic, what have you,
in the South, I am better than millions
of other people in this society.
There's a floor below which I cannot fall,
because that's where enslaved people are.
(upbeat trumpet music)
In the 1830s, England made the moral decision
to abolish slavery, and they came up with a pile
of cash to compensate the slave owners.
But Southern slave masters refused
to relinquish their property at any price.
They were both rich and self-righteous.
Slave owners told themselves lots of stories
while they were holding slaves, and they told themselves
how great they were, how kind they were,
how malevolent the system was, and they sold
that in photos and images and plays and music.
Was that truly North?
Even prior to the Civil War,
that there was this notion.
Oh, no, no, we're treating them very well.
They're better off,
or you don't know how bad they had it in Africa.
Abolitionists are crazies,
and I understand who they were trying to fool.
Were they fooling themselves?
Did they actually believe this?
They do.
Some do.
There's a lot of evidence that as the Civil War comes along,
and, of course, it's incredibly disruptive.
Many of the men are off fighting, and so women are head
of the household, and as things begin to unravel
in the South, the enslaved people start to realize
that they can walk away, and they start to resist,
and there are these really amazing letters people write
to each other, women writing
to their sisters saying you will never believe
what happened today.
They left.
They just packed up and left after all we've--
done for them.
(upbeat music)
Rebel leaders were clear-eyed and brutally honest.
The Mississippi Declaration of Secession proclaimed,
"Our position is thoroughly identified
"with the institution of slavery,
"the greatest material interest of the world.
"A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization."
So, the Confederate Army couldn't conquer the North,
but this myth of the lost cause eventually did,
and I think it's because we somehow needed it to be true.
There had to be something noble about the Confederacy.
It couldn't be that half the nation took up arms
to defend evil.
Consider Robert E. Lee, for example.
I was taught that he was a gentleman, a reluctant warrior,
who acted out of a kind of tragic loyalty
to his state, rather than his country.
He was a good Christian, and he hated slavery, right?
Well, Robert E. Lee himself owned 200 slaves,
and when his property displeased him,
he lashed them 50 times with a bullwhip, because,
as Robert E. Lee wrote,
"This painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary
"for their instruction as a race."
(slow symphonic music)
So, how did this slaver
and traitor become a hero on 1000 pedestals?
Well, the beard helped.
It's important to look the part.
They've caught a spy.
I approved the execution auditor.
I am unwilling that this will be
a single life lost unnecessarily.
I wonder if you'd mind countermanding that order?
I will, yes, sir.
Lee lived under foreign domination.
He led a sacred cause and fell at the hands
of the unrighteous, just like Jesus.
Oh, here's my favorite part.
No less than FDR called Lee one
of our greatest American Christians.
(organ music)
Churchill upped the ante.
He said he was the noblest American who ever lived.
Take that, Lincoln, you loser.
Jesus Christ, Robert E. Lee.
Really, the only difference is
that the historical Jesus was almost certainly dark-skinned.
(upbeat band music)
But here's the real message.
If Lee was divinely virtuous,
then so was the Southern cause.
(crowd cheering)
(somber trumpet music)
Thankfully, Frederick Douglass dispensed
with these rose-colored glasses.
When Lee died, Douglass wrote,
"We can scarcely take up a newspaper
"that is not filled with nauseating flatteries.
"It would seem that the soldier who kills the most men
"in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian,
"and entitled to the highest place in heaven."
As payback for Lee's treason,
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton seized his stately home
and converted the grounds into Arlington National Cemetery.
There's a reason people describe the cost of war as blood
and treasure, but some people
who had enough treasure could avoid giving any blood.
(slow string music)
Up North, the powers that be agreed
that they should not have to dirty their fine hands.
The draft law allowed anyone to buy a substitute for $300,
the annual income of a working man.
Oddly, not everyone was thrilled about the system.
Lots of working class people began to really push back
against the draft, and that push back explodes
in July of 1863 in New York City.
Four days of full-on rioting.
It was the worst civil uprising in American history.
They destroyed buildings, they destroyed recruiting offices,
they also beat up rich people, and they would say,
"There goes a $300 man," and run across the street
and pound a guy who looked wealthy,
because the assumption was he's here
because he's bought his way out of the draft.
(upbeat music)
The war begun to protect wealthy land owners ends
by jump starting the Industrial Age.
Cornelius Vanderbilt and railroads, J.P. Morgan and weapons,
Andrew Carnegie and iron, John D. Rockefeller and oil,
all made their first fortunes as war speculators.
Those who followed the money had learned a priceless lesson:
War is good for business.
(guns firing)
(drums beating)
After the war, both sides were eager
to get back to business.
Widespread segregation recreated
a permanent black underclass, a source of cheap labor
to make the white man, North and South, rich.
(slow symphonic music)
The lost cause becomes a national myth.
It's just so much easier to buy that narrative.
To say it was a big mistake.
It wasn't about slavery, and now,
the real story is reunification of the sides.
The reconciliation.
Both sides are to blame,
and you see this in the annual commemoration.
(people chatting) (slow accordion music)
All of them we honor,
not asking under which flag they fought then,
thankful that they stand together under one flag now.
(crowd cheering)
So, the reason I was taught these myths in high school,
meaning the reason that this became
the nationally accepted version, is because believing
that was important to the national economy for 100 years.
Oh, it's okay that we have this underpaid lower class
of black people, because they underpinned
a lot of our economy.
Right, absolutely. It was in everybody's
financial interest to lie about the history.
Right, everything is fine as it is, and, of course,
in the 20th century, post-war,
white Americans' fortunes are soaring.
It's the great post-war boom, and so it's easy
to focus on that, and say we, as a country, are doing great.
Yeah, we're doing great, we've always been great.
And there's a subset that is not doing great.
We had this little disagreement, but it's fine.
It's okay.
We have some memorials now.
Everything's cool.
Everybody's happy about it, except for those people,
but no one's going to ask them.
Right.
(slow accordion music)
There is a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Manchester,
England, that is an ocean beyond
the farthest he ever traveled in life.
During the Civil War,
the Confederacy shipped slave-grown cotton to Manchester
to be processed in exchange, they hoped, for money
to fund their war, but the British mill workers refused
to work with the slave-grown cotton.
They had a lot of sympathy for the slaves,
and they certainly did not want to help the slave masters.
Abraham Lincoln called their sacrifice
sublime Christian heroism,
so now there's a statue to him there.
It's kind of amazing, really, that these British workers,
pretty poor themselves, decided
to put principle over self-interest.
In the end, they were the ones
who finally wouldn't follow the money.
(upbeat country music)