Despite the fact that the South was becoming "ever more turned in on itself, sequestered, defensive, ideological, insulated," there were those who raised their voices in dissent to the Religion of the Lost Cause. They were not, however, well received. In much the same way as pro-union sentiment was stifled while the South was seeking to win a separate identity on the battlefield, those who resisted the post-war effort to create an independent South in the hearts and minds of its people faced considerable persecution. Believing that there was strength in unity, the South was not inclined to tolerate dissenters, and virtually to a man, these voices of dissent were driven from the region. They discovered the hard way just how potent a force the Religion of the Lost Cause was in forging a solid South.

As I've already noted, Southern orthodoxy in the late 19th century had three major components: Race, Religion and Education. What follows is a brief survey of each.

RACE

White supremacy became a key tenet of the Southern way of life in the post-war period. It was so important to the emerging Southern identity, that racial heresy came to be more dangerous than theological speculation. Southerners took for granted that the Negro was a beast, and that he had sunk to a morally degenerate condition once the discipline of slavery had been removed. And in the post-war period, a great deal of intellectual energy was expended to find a substitute for slavery as a way of controlling the Negro, and insuring his virtue. Slavery--Southerners argued--had been a God ordained, spiritual institution. Under slavery, blacks had lived an orderly life, and had been civilized by contact with the whites of the South. As late as 1876, Southern Presbyterians were still justifying slavery as being of "Divine appointment". Southern Baptists were still passing resolutions justifying it as late as 1892.

During the post-war period--many of the old teachings about slavery were resurrected. Southerners used the same pro-slavery arguments that were common before the Civil War to not only justify the pre-war institution, but also to support the emerging institution of segregation. "Jim Crow" segregation emerged strongly in last decade of the nineteenth century. In the book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward notes the degree to which the races intermingled in the decades after the Civil War. The familiarity of the races that had existed under slavery remained. It was only after the political upheaval of the Populist rebellion, when poor whites and poor blacks who were being victimized by the sharecropping system--united in a fusion party of the two races (the Populists) and voted out the Democrats. The result was the use of the race card by appealing to White Supremacy. Race trumped economic interests. Poor whites voted against their economic interests out of a well-cultivated fear that the bottom rail was about to be placed on top again. Once in power again, Southern Democrats imposed laws that disenfranchising blacks and instituted a strict system of Jim Crow segregation which effectively re-enslaved blacks. This new "peculiar institution" had to be justified, and once again, a great deal of intellectual energy was expended in the effort.

One of the arguments Southerners advanced to justify this new structure to replace slavery was to romanticize "the old time Negroes." Sentimental images were resurrected of the dutiful slave who had remained loyal even during the Civil War. These were the Old Uncles and beloved Mammies who had cared for the children of the South. When slavery ended--so this mythology held--blacks had been honest, virtuous, and upright. Now, the South was threatened by black immorality. A new generation had arisen that was intoxicated by liberty, that was now indolent, sensual and devilish. Unleashed, black men were little more than rapists who sought any opportunity to attack white women. Black presence was "an eating cancer" that imperiled the South, such prominent whites as Rebecca Felton (the first woman Senator) argued. To control this peril, and protect the public welfare, blacks had to be segregated.

This mythology had clear roots in the earlier pro-slavery argument. The image of blacks as savages, and the twin needs to control their depravity and to insure the safety of white families, had clear parallels in the pre-Civil War effort to provide justification for slavery. But there was a difference. Whereas during the pre-war years a black person had some monetary value as a slave, during the post-war period he or she had none. This devaluation of black lives was reflected in a striking increase in the lynching and murder of black men.

By the 1890's, segregation had come to be the accepted substitute for slavery. Three basic principles governed the new institution: no social mixing, separate schools and churches, and the white control of politics. To justify the last of these three principles, Southerners devised the myth of reconstruction which in some ways was an elaboration on the mythology of black decline. This moral degeneration began, Southerners argued, when blacks were put in charge by the North. The result was governments filled with ignorance and corruption. The Klan had arisen, the new myth held, to bring about moral renewal. In 1889, the Nashville Christian Advocate, the voice of Southern Methodism, claimed that the Klan emerged in a desperate attempt to restore "good morals and civil order." There had been some violence, The Advocate's editors allowed, but not much. Perhaps a few persons had satisfied personal grudges, but on the whole, the Klan had acted to restore righteousness to the South.

The Nashville Christian Advocate was correct about one thing. The Klan was in fact a vital organization in the effort to restore the Old South, and a key institution in the Religion of the Lost Cause. It began as a social fraternity for bored young ex-Confederates. Like a college fraternity, they took their name from Greek word kuklos meaning circle or band. The Klan had its beginnings in Pulaski, Tennessee, but it quickly spread as Southerners came to see it as a vehicle for opposing reconstruction by the North. Slowly it became an "invisible empire" with the twin goals of protecting Southern whites from indignity, and crusading for white supremacy. The first Grand Wizard was Nathan Bedford Forrest, and a number of ex-confederate officers comprised its leadership. Clergy like Father Abram Ryan were members, and rank and file Confederates became rank and file Klan members.

The Klan reflected the mystical Celtic roots of Scottish, Irish and Scotch-Irish settlers in the South. It included many community leaders, and used images of darkness, graveyards, ghosts, and spirits to scare blacks. Macabre devices like conical head pieces which were decorated with horns, and long red tongues were designed to frighten and intimidate. To drive home the point, Klan riders would leave gallows and miniature coffins to frighten any black who dared assert his or her rights, and to intimidate any whites who dissented against the prevailing orthodoxy. The purpose of much of the Klan's behavior was to scare superstitious blacks, but it also offered symbolism, ritual, and organization to the Religion of the Lost Cause. The Klan came to be viewed as an army of defense for the emerging Southern Zion, and because it was largely made up of ex-Confederates, it was. The Klan faded from view when Reconstruction ended, and the South was redeemed. In a real sense, it was the victim of its own success.

The Klan was popularized by Thomas Dixon--a graduate of Wake Forest College and a Baptist minister. Dixon was born in Shelby, North Carolina, and grew up admiring the Klan. As an adult, he wrote two novels: The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman. The theme of both of these books was black decline. In rather graphic terms, Dixon purported to show how reconstruction had turned the Negro into a beast to be feared and guarded. The black man was painted as an animal who roams at night and sleeps in the day. Dixon spoke of a "black death" abroad in the land, conjuring up images of the plague. The Clansman was made into one of the most popular movies of all time, "The Birth of A Nation," by another Southerner, D.W. Griffith. Southern-born President Woodrow Wilson said the movie was like "writing history with lightening." Here was a glorification of the Army that had restored Southern society to the order that it had had before the war; the Army that had righted the great wrong.

As a result of this glorification of the Klan, the Second Klan was born in 1915. The organizer of this second Klan was a Methodist Circuit rider by the name of William J. Simmons. He selected the top of Stone Mountain, Georgia, which latter became a Lost Cause monument, for the Second Klan's first cross-burning. Cross-burning has its origins in the Scottish Highlands where it is common. This practice was glorified in the novels of Dixon, and so it was not surprising that on Thanksgiving Night, 1915, the first cross was burned on the mountain top. This practice became a hall-mark of the new Klan.

The new Klan, however, was different from the old. The new Klan did not see itself as an Army of Defense for the South, but instead stressed Americanism. And, as a result, it spread around the nation. By the 1920's, the differences between the first and second Klan was clear. What had once been a secret fraternity of Southern white supremacists had become a national vigilante group opposed to Blacks, Catholics, Jews, or any other group that threatened their vision of a white and Christian America.

RELIGION

Another stronghold of orthodoxy in the South was religion as Charles Wilson makes clear. An example of what passed for orthodoxy was J. William Jones. A Southern Baptist, Jones acquired the title of "Fighting Parson for his service in A.P. Hill's Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia. He was among the intimate friends of Robert E. Lee, and offered in his sermons a potent mix of Christianity and the Confederacy. He became the author of Lee's biography, and the first to canonize him. Jones was a preserver of Confederate memorabilia and sacred traditions, and painted a picture of saintly, gallant Confederate heros. The average soldier had been holy, and their leaders men of prayer and great Bible readers, he proclaimed in Christ in the Camp or Religion in Lee's Army. This book claimed to be a record of the revivals that broke out in the last two years of the war, but it was more than that. It was a collection of parables about religion and morality in which the men of the Confederate Army became the moral and religious exemplars. Like many others, Jones believed that the Southern cause had been the defense of the Christian faith, and he was not shy in making a strong identification of the South and Christianity.

Jones would became chaplain at UNC where gave the following prayer: "Lord we acknowledge Thee as the all-wise author of every good and perfect gift. We recognize Thy presence and wisdom in the healing shower. We acknowledge Thou had a divine plan when Thou made the rattle snake, as well as the song bird, and this was without help from Charles Darwin. But we believe Thou will admit the grave mistake in giving the decision to the wrong side in eighteen hundred and sixty-five."

EDUCATION

A third major area of Southern orthodoxy was education. There were any number of schools that developed for the sole purpose of educating children in the traditions of the Lost Cause. Many denominational colleges were centers of the Lost Cause Religion. Preachers who taught there promoted the link between the Confederacy and Christianity, and the student bodies consisted of large numbers of former confederates. Emory College, a Methodist school, was one such example, but leadership in this movement belonged to the Southern Baptists.

These schools refused to use text books from the North because they failed to tell truth about the war. (This was also true of Southern Sunday Schools.) When they were unable to find acceptable literature, the Southern clergy offered their own defenses of the South's position which were adopted for use in the schools. All of this was part of an effort to inculcate the values of the Confederacy into a new generation.

Another part of this effort was the organization of groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy for the children of veterans. Other institutions were Stonewall Jackson Sunday Schools, as well as a number of secondary schools that were founded for the same purpose. These schools had many ex-Confederates on their faculty so that children could be exposed to the virtues of these men, and so that the goals of South would not be lost to future generations.

As Wilson points out, there were two religious schools that became major institutional shrines to the Religion of the Lost Cause. The first was the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. This "Stronghold of Southern Aristocracy" was founded by Leonidas Polk, an Episcopal Bishop and Southern General. In 1892, all students had to wear Confederate gray uniforms, and participate in drills under eye of ex-Confederate officers. In the Chapel, Confederate Battle flags from every state were displayed, and among the faculty members was General Edmund Kirby Smith the last Confederate General to surrender his command. Smith had gone into exile in Mexico and Cuba after the War, before returning to the South. Wilson quotes one Northerner in an early class who reported: northerners were labeled as "infidels, Mercenary Vandals, Scum of the Earth," and the Southern women he met were "the very personification of His Satanic Majesty." For some reason, this young man did not stay long at the school.

Washington and Lee, in Lexington, Virginia was another school of the Lost Cause. When R.E. Lee was elected president in 1865 the school--like the South--was on the brink of bankruptcy. With his election, it earned a reputation as the home of the Lost Cause.

Robert E. Lee was no doubt comfortable in Lexington. Washington and Lee shared Lexington with VMI where the cadets wore uniforms of gray and where the faculty was staffed with ex-Confederates. While President of the Washington and Lee, R.E. Lee became a spokesman for the Religion of the Lost Cause. The Southern defeat, he insisted, was the result of drinking, gambling, and profanity. To do penance, he called for fast days, days of humiliation for revivals, and for honoring the Sabbath. By focusing on these kinds of sin, and on the purgative character of the revival, Lee's prescription fit well with established habits, and his advice dove-tailed right into the binge--purge pattern that we've already noted.

A PROPHET WITHOUT HONOR

As I noted earlier, heretics were not welcome in the South. No dissent was permitted, and those who dared raise their voice to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies were driven out. One such heretic was a man by the name of Andrew Sledd. Sledd refused to participate in the Religion of the Lost Cause. Instead, he saw himself as a prophet challenging the identification of Christianity and the Old South. He was willing to challenge the verities of his day, and at one point or another, he clashed with each of the three major components of the reigning orthodoxy.

The race issue came to the fore in 1902 when Sledd raised his voice against the reigning racial creed: Jim Crow Segregation. His willingness to speak out was provoked by a series of encounters with the harsh realities of segregation while traveling across the South. Ignorant of the dehumanization that blacks had to endure prior to travels, Sledd saw first hand the brutal nature of Jim Crow.

Perhaps the defining moment for Sledd came when he observed the lynching of Sam Hose. Sledd witnessed this event when the train he was riding stopped to allow passengers to watch. It was bad enough that another train soon arrived from a nearby town carrying people eager to see this spectacle, but Sledd was sickened as he watched the crowd burn and mutilate the body after it had been lynched, and then hawk pieces for souvenirs. Moved to write a article condemning such abuses, he submitted it to the Atlantic Monthly. In this piece, ["The Negro: Another View," (July 1902)], Sledd rejected the practice of lynching because it violated the negro's rights which were both divine and civil in nature. While allowing that the Negro was presently inferior to whites, went on to violate the reigning orthodoxy once more by suggesting that this inferiority was the result of slavery and segregation, and could be erased through affirmative measures. For this, Sledd was called a traitor to his race, and eventually he was forced from his position as a teacher of classics at Emory. Fearful of the impact on the college's patronage, the Emory administration forced his resignation.

Sledd left the South and went into a forced exile at Yale where he earned his Ph.D. in nine months. Upon his graduation, he returned to teach in South where he was hired to be the first President of the University of Florida in 1905. Sledd was forced to resign in 1909 because he refused to lower the high academic standards he had set. Again challenging the Lost Cause mentality, Sledd insisted that the University should be an educational institution, not a place of indoctrination.

In 1914, Sledd returned to Emory. His father-in-law was Warren Candler, a Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the brother of Asa Candler who founded Coca Cola. Asa gave the money to organize Emory University, and to found the Candler School of Theology. Not surprisingly, Asa's brother Warren was named the first President. Warren promptly hired his son-in-law in order to bring his favorite daughter home from exile. Sledd was the only member of the new faculty to have an earned doctorate. Hired to teach Greek and New Testament in the School of Theology, Sledd got in trouble, over time, for his liberal views on Scripture. Sledd insisted on studying Scripture as any other piece of literature, and applied literary criticism to the Biblical text. Such an approach challenged the literal views of the Orthodox. As a result, contributors began to withdrew funds from the school, and Sledd's salary was cut. Eventually, he lost his home and died a poor man.

But Sledd never repented of his heresies. He was willing to pay the price of his dissent. And the students he trained at Emory had a major impact on the disintegration of the old Orthodoxies. When the church in Birmingham was bombed, it was Sledd's students who were the only white clergy to reach out to the black community in their moment of grief.

Individuals like Sledd are now largely forgotten. They faced defeat and a discredited future alone. They died deep in debt. But before he died, Sledd wrote that he believed he had made a small contribution to spread of righteousness in the region. He encouraged many Southerners to speak out against lynching, and other abuses of blacks. He helped establish new standards of academic freedom. And helped to give rise to a new South where whites and blacks could live together in equality.

Today, Andrew Sledd is a prophet without honor in his own country, even though we in the modern South owe him a great deal. Few Southerners know he lived, and still fewer appreciate the changes he helped bring to the region. When his family returned to the Emory campus to view the portrait of him that they had donated to the School of Theology, they found it stored in a closet. But none of this would surprise Andrew Sledd. In a lecture given to one of his classes at the Candler School of Theology, he described the true prophet in words that could have well been written for his epitaph:

"The man has disappeared in the prophet. As a man he leaves nothing but a name, grown wellnigh meaningless; as a prophet, he leaves a message in which we recognize the voice of a changeless and eternal God."

Amen and Amen.