The monuments at issue in this case honor and glorify the Southern Confederacy. Therefore, it is with the Confederacy that this analysis must begin.

Louisiana’s antebellum economy and social order were rooted in the twin institutions of African slavery and white supremacy. In 1860, Louisiana had a total population of 708,002, of which 47 percent were enslaved, and the entire pre-war Louisiana legal system was based on maintaining white supremacy in every phase of life. In its colonial days, the 1724 Code Noir disenfranchised all blacks; when Louisiana became a state in 1812 its constitution limited the right to vote to free white male citizens who owned property or paid taxes. Subsequent laws limited voting to free white males until after the Civil War. As respected Louisiana federal jurist Judge John Minor Wisdom pointed out over fifty years ago, Louisiana social history is rooted in “the dominant white citizens’ firm determination to maintain white supremacy in state and local governments by denying to Negroes the right to vote.”

The Confederate cause in the Civil War was a tremendously violent campaign to hold onto this legal institution of white supremacy. The historical record is clear that the Southern states seceded from the Union and engaged in a treasonous war against the United States government because they were determined to retain the legal right to own, buy, sell, and sexually and physically abuse black human beings. There is no historical basis for the position that the Civil War was fought over anything other than the South’s determination to retain the institution of chattel slavery. “Beyond ideology lay naked economic and political interests because southern white elites needed cheap labor akin to that provided by slaves if they were to remain a ruling aristocracy.”

Indeed, Louisiana representatives openly identified slavery as the reason for secession: As a separate republic, Louisiana remembers too well the whisperings of European diplomacy for the abolition of slavery in the times of an-nexation not to be apprehensive of bolder demonstrations from the same quarter and the North in this country. The people of the slave holding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery. Slavery and the supremacy of whites was the essence of the struggle.

Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution of the Confederate States stated:

In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.

The Confederates lost. The violence and terror of the Civil War resulted in massive death and damage to the country. About 750,000 people died in the Civil War, leaving hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans. As a result of that defeat, Louisiana was faced with a new power bloc in voting—its African American population, who comprised nearly half of its census. Though clearly reluctant to do so, Louisiana authorized black men to vote.

The losers of the Civil War, however, were not prepared to give up their political power, their way of life, or their property. Many of the former Confederates took on armed resistance against the new regime, and by 1898, white Louisianans managed by politics, violence and terror to reinstitute white supremacy in political power and daily life. Black voters, who had only been allowed to vote since 1865, were officially disenfranchised again through an amendment to the state constitution that erected educational, literacy, and property qualifications for those who wished to vote unless exempted by the grandfather clause. This act of racist disenfranchisement was done openly. The chair of the 1898 convention declared: “We (meet) here to establish the supremacy of the white race, and the white race constitutes the Democratic party of this State.”

As Judge Minor pointed out in his 1963 opinion, “[t]he Convention of 1898 interpreted its mandate from the people to be, to disfranchise as many Negroes and as few whites as possible.” The constitutional amendment had its intended effect of reducing black voters from 130,344 in 1897 to 5,320 in 1900. By 1910, black voter registration had been further reduced to 730 people in Louisiana, or less than 0.5 per cent. White supremacy was back; black citizens were again subordinated and suppressed.

The white South also sought to revise the history of the Civil War by creating a new and inaccurate narrative that 1) cast the Confederacy as a noble and praiseworthy cause; 2) denied the central role that slavery played in causing the Civil War; and 3) downplayed the brutal reality of American slavery.

“In this revision of the past, the antebellum South was recalled as a benevolent, orderly society that pitted its noble values against the aggressive greed of northern industrial society. Denying slavery as the root cause of the war, the proponents of the Lost Cause achieved an ideological victory – even as the South was defeated in the war – by shaping the popular memory of the conflict. In the process, this ideological victory helped insure widespread American acceptance of the South’s justification for the racial status quo.” -— Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation & Reconstruction 216 (2005).

This distortion of history, crafted by white southerners, is a phenomenon that historians now call the Cult of the Lost Cause.

According to documents filed with the National Register of Historic Places: The Cult of the Lost Cause has its roots in the Southern search for justification and the need to find a substitute for victory in the Civil War. In attempting to deal with defeat, Southerners created an image of the war as a great heroic epic. A major theme in the Cult of the Lost Cause was the clash of two civilizations, one inferior to the other. The North, ‘invigorated’ by constant struggle with nature, had become materialistic, grasping for wealth and power. The South had a ‘more generous climate’, which had led to a finer society based upon ‘veracity and honor in man, chastity and fidelity in women.’ Like tragic heroes, Southerners had waged a noble but doomed struggle to preserve their superior civilization. There was an element of chivalry in the way the South had fought, achieving noteworthy victories against staggering odds. This was the ‘Lost Cause’ as the late nineteenth century saw it, and a whole generation of Southerners set about glorifying and celebrating it. Glorification took many forms, including speeches, organizations such as the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, reunions, publications, holidays such as Lee's birthday, and innumerable memorials. The six main assertions of the Cult are: Secession, not slavery, caused the Civil War; African Americans were “faithful slaves,” loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom; the Confederacy was defeated militarily only because of the Union's overwhelming advantages in men and resources; Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly; the most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee; and Southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones.

This was the “Lost Cause” as the late nineteenth century saw it, and a whole generation of Southerners set about glorifying and celebrating it. Glorification took many forms, including speeches, organizations such as the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, reunions, publications, holidays such as Lee's birthday, and innumerable memorials.

The Cult of the Lost Cause continued to dominate Southern cultural history in the early twentieth century, and it is indeed still alive and well today. If the Court has the occasion to review the public hearings held by the City of New Orleans over the removal of these statues, it will find nearly every one of the core assertions of the Cult of the Lost Cause was repeated, often more than once, by the white southerners who objected to the removal of these monuments.

Moreover, three of the statues at issue in this case have been described by the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism as THE major monuments in New Orleans representing the Cult of the Lost Cause—the monuments of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard. It is not by accident that these three monuments were erected and venerated. They were elevated to honor the violent, treasonous war to retain white supremacy and to legitimize those who continue to seek it.

The Cult of the Lost Cause is not, as its past and present advocates contend, a benevolent historical tribute to Confederate veterans. Rather, the Cult of the Lost Cause was at the heart of the ideology of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy groups that portrayed the emancipated African American as a threat to democracy and white womanhood. It also sought to return Louisiana to its pre-Civil War days of total white control and supremacy.

This is the historical context in which these monuments to white supremacy were erected and are maintained. This context is essential to this court’s evaluation of whether these monuments should continue to stand in New Orleans.