In my opinion, the Lost Cause was a childish tactic. Have you ever seen two children playing, and when one of them wins, the loser automatically starts whining and claims that he cheated? To me, that is what I see when I look at the Lost Cause. Its as if the Confederates were the sore losers and came up with excuses as to why they lost. Then, to make matters even worse, the Old South just swept the past under the rug and went about their business as if the battles never happened. In fact, not only did the Old South not accept their defeat, they did everything within their power and within the newly adopted Amendments to revert back to their old ways of mistreating African-Americans and thinking less of them. The emergence if Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan are the most common of examples, oppressing the rights of African-Americans and intimidating them to not do things such as vote, even though the 14th Amendment clearly states that they can do so. It is for these reasons that the Reconstruction failed so miserably. The South never even gave it a chance to, and because of that, it slowed the process down so much that it was at a stand still until the 1950s.
It was very interesting to read the actual words from each states legislature at their time of secession. It spelled out their exact reasons for leaving the Union. The people of Georgia felt that there was a conspiracy against the slave states, that the Republican Party had an agenda against them. It was no secret that the Republicans were very much against slavery. Slowly, but surely, the Republicans were taking control of the Northern states. This climaxed with the election of 1860, which not only gave the Republicans even more control of the Legislative branch of the government, but with the election of Abraham Lincoln, also gave them the Executive branch as well. To the Southern people, it seemed as though the North had gained control of the entire government.
