Start with the word meme, the way Richard Dawkins meant it in 1976, a piece of culture that copies itself from mind to mind and adapts to whatever medium will carry it. By that measure the Lost Cause ranks among the most successful memes this country has produced. Confederate veterans engineered it after the war, men who had lost the fighting and refused to lose the meaning. Jubal Early and the people around him built a version of the war in which slavery was a sideshow, the South fought for high principle, and the enslaved stayed content until Northern armies disturbed them. That version was false when it was written. It won anyway.
