The Sons of Confederate Veterans traces its roots back to 1896. Members pledge to honor their “heroic” Confederate ancestors by perpetuating their “glorious heritage of valor, chivalry and honor” and instilling in their descendants “reverence for the principles represented by the Confederate States of America.” For its first eight decades, the SCV was overshadowed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a national network of women’s memorial associations that took the lead in honoring all things Confederate.

But during the 1980s, the SCV was reborn in response to an increase in the perceived threat to its traditional narrative, its membership growing to about 30,000, spread out over roughly 800 local camps. Until then, the SCV’s embrace of a largely mythical Lost Cause narrative that celebrated Confederate generals as Christian warriors, rank-and-file soldiers as defending a noble cause rooted in a constitutional defense of states’ rights, and its denial that slavery had anything to do with the war remained largely unchecked in much of the South. The SCV dismissed new scholarship that emphasized the centrality of slavery and emancipation to the war, as well as the roughly 180,000 African Americans who fought in the United States Army, as politically correct “revisionism.” Indeed, the SCV became the modern voice of the Lost Cause as a racial ideology, which in its origins and well through the Civil War centennial in the 1960s celebrated the ties of Confederate soldiers and their descendants as the friends and protectors of “faithful slaves” and their descendants.

But the SCV has increasingly found itself on the defensive. Historic sites and museums, including the Museum of the Confederacy, in Richmond, Virginia, have devoted exhibits and programming to the tough questions surrounding the Confederacy’s defense of slavery and white supremacy. In 2007, North Carolina’s General Assembly passed resolutions formally apologizing for the institution of slavery in the state. Bruce Tyson, the SCV’s state commander, denounced the resolution’s condemnation of the injustice, cruelty, and brutality of slavery. “Although some of our ancestors did own slaves,” he said, “there is no evidence in most cases that they were ‘cruel’ or ‘brutal’ toward their slaves, nor that our ancestors were, in general, racist.”

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Such statements not only defy enormous historical evidence; they parrot the claims made by Jefferson Davis and hundreds of other prominent Lost Cause spokesmen in the late 19th century who attempted to embed into the American imagination the idea that white southerners had never really fought for slavery, even while they kept African Americans as a race under paternalistic care and control.

In their effort to defend the integrity of their ancestors, SCV leaders embraced the myth that thousands of enslaved men fought as soldiers in the Confederate army. By the 1990s, hundreds of websites—many promoted by the SCV—helped spread stories of brave black soldiers fighting side by side with their white comrades in defense of a shared “southern homeland,” a claim that flies in the face of historical evidence.