How the two sections, formerly brothers and lately deadly enemies, would reunite into the single American nation they had once been was the great challenge that faced statesmen, writers, and artists after 1865. Southerners had to come to terms with their roles in this new nation that they had so bitterly resisted. In the years after 1865 the Northern states decided the future course of the United States as a democracy grounded on commerce and industry, not as an agricultural republic with strict racial and class distinctions. The Union Army, composed of citizens of the northern states, recent European immigrants, and African Americans liberated from bondage, had won a complete victory.
The war brought the South immense losses of life and property and the destruction of their slavery-based society. Some of these men fought to preserve the political and social values of their Southern way of life others fought because they witnessed their native states and communities under attack by Northerners.Īfter four years of warfare the Confederacy suffered total defeat at the hands of the Union. Wealthy planters and slave-owners from Virginia to Texas joined the Confederate States Army in company with non-slaveholding farmers, landless shopkeepers, and laborers in commerce and industry. Many Southern citizens had pledged their allegiance to the revolutionary Confederate States of America. Henry Mosler’s oil painting “The Lost Cause” has a complex history, one that reflects the turmoil and uncertainty the United States faced as it searched for a way to recover from its greatest political and social cataclysm, the American Civil War. Status: The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina