“This Is a White Man's Government, Conceived by White Men”: Reconstruction Myth, Gun Culture, and the White Supremacist Challenge to the Legacy of Gettysburg at the Turn of the 20th Century

Southern whites who identify with an imagined Lost Cause maintain a bizarre fixation not only with the Battle of Gettysburg but also with Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address delivered some months later. This obsession can lead to serious political consequences. Over the past ten years, historian Julian E. Zelizer has repeatedly noted the continuing relevance of William White’s 1957 observation that filibusters against civil-rights measures were southern white payback for Gettysburg. For well over a century, “southern heritage” apologists have downplayed the battle and its symbolism, insisting that Lincoln used the battle as an excuse to falsely assert equality as the nation’s First Principle.

If the proposition that “all [people] are created equal” isn’t the basis for the nation’s founding, what is? I argue that nineteenth century white supremacist rhetoric was designed to produce a subset of whites whose ideological progeny remain active, dedicated to the notion that armed vigilantism is the linchpin of the nation’s freedoms. By building violence into white identity, white supremacist polemicists were able to motivate white men to engage in voter intimidation and murder for decades after Reconstruction in the name of preserving “civilization.” They also persuaded poor or illiterate whites to support disfranchisement measures to their own disadvantage.

To support my paper, I use primary sources including fictional works, and newspaper articles and political speeches from the turn of the twentieth century lauding Reconstruction violence as a justification for pushing disfranchisement some twenty years later. For present-day examples of southern white scholars who eschew equality, I cite fellows for the Abbeville Institute, a “southern heritage” advocacy center based in South Carolina. For foundational context, I rely on long-established scholars, among them Glenda Gilmore, while engaging with more recent treatments of the impact of memory upon law and justice by historians including Michael Ayers Trotti.