The name comes from The Lost Cause, an 1866 book by the Richmond journalist Edward Pollard. Former Confederate officers and groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894, promoted the story. They raised money for monuments and pushed Southern schools to adopt textbooks that matched it.
The Confederacy's own leaders said otherwise. Several seceding states named slavery as their reason in official declarations, and Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens called slavery the cornerstone of the new government in 1861. Films such as The Birth of a Nation in 1915 and Gone with the Wind in 1939 brought the Lost Cause to national audiences.
The myth helped justify Jim Crow by recasting Black political power during Reconstruction as a mistake. It still shapes arguments over Confederate monuments, flags and how schools teach the Civil War.