The Lost Cause at Fort Pulaski: How a Fort Remembered the Confederacy

Members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy at the new monument to General John Hunt Morgan in Lexington, Kentucky, 1911. Library of Congress.

The Lost Cause myth

The Lost Cause is the story white Southerners told to justify secession and protect the memory of the Confederacy. It has four parts:

1. Not about slavery: the South fought to defend homes, property and states' rights against an overbearing federal government.
2. Benign slavery: slavery benefited both the enslaved and the enslaver.
3. Outnumbered: the Confederacy lost only to greater numbers.
4. Heroes: Confederate soldiers and generals, like Robert E. Lee, were heroes and martyrs — though they fought to preserve slavery.

Women keep the memory

After the war, white Southern women's groups led the work of honoring the Confederate dead. Ladies Memorial Associations founded Confederate cemeteries, set April 26 as Confederate Memorial Day, celebrated veterans and raised monuments. Savannah's association honored the veterans of Fort Pulaski.

In the early 1890s, Georgia newspapers rediscovered the "Immortal 600," Confederate officers imprisoned at Fort Pulaski, and cast them as heroes and martyrs. Former prisoners told their stories at celebrations, in books and in speeches, building a Confederate narrative of the fort.

Program of Georgia's Confederate Veterans Reunion, November 1899. Fort Pulaski archives.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy

On September 11, 1894, Anna Davenport Raines founded the Savannah Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). Its mission covered everything: honoring the dead, preserving sites, building monuments, helping veterans and holding celebrations. Its greatest influence was in education, spreading a favorable Confederate history of the war, and it created the Children of the Confederacy to pass it on.

In 1903 the chapter presented surviving defenders with a Confederate flag flown at Pulaski during the bombardment, read Colonel Olmstead's letters and veterans' accounts, and staged a parade, letting white Savannah celebrate the fort and its defenders.

The park adopts the story

In 1934, Ralston B. Lattimore joined Fort Pulaski National Monument as assistant historian, with a free hand to create its interpretive program, as was normal in the Park Service. He turned to the "experts": the UDC.

• 1935: after long correspondence, the UDC held its Georgia state convention at the fort, bringing hundreds of members. Lattimore let them fly the Confederate battle flag there for the first time — though during the Confederate occupation only the Confederacy's national flag had flown. The fort had a new Confederate identity.
• Mutual benefit: the UDC brought visitors, including Children of the Confederacy, and opened private collections that shaped the park's story. In return it could honor Confederate soldiers where they fought.
• 1938: the UDC dedicated a plaque in the fort's northwest corner to two soldiers who saved the national flag during the bombardment, and petitioned for the Park Service to say "The War Between the States" — implying two sovereign nations, not a rebellion. The park's 1940 visitor booklets used the phrase.

The UDC raises the Confederate battle flag and the U.S. flag at its 1935 convention at Fort Pulaski. Fort Pulaski archives.

A centennial and beyond

• 1961: for the one-hundred-year anniversary of the fort's capture by the Georgia militia in January 1861, members of the UDC and the Sons of Confederate Veterans marched in to reenact it, the Savannah High School Band played "Dixie," soldiers' letters were read, and Savannah's mayor, Malcolm MacLean, praised Confederate sacrifice.
• 1980s–1990s: events still centered the Confederacy and the Lost Cause: an annual Confederate Nog Christmas Party recalling 1861, a visitor-center video that said "The War Between the States," and demonstrations in which staff wore only Confederate gray.
• Early 2000s: the Confederate national flag flew over the fort until then.
• 2007: reenactments of the Immortal Six Hundred celebrated Confederate determination.
• 2012: the UDC and SCV returned to dedicate a monument to the thirteen soldiers who died there as prisoners.

A Confederate reenactor at the centennial of the fort's bombardment, April 1962. Fort Pulaski archives.

Sources

Based on "History of Memory, Tourism, and the Lost Cause at Fort Pulaski," Fort Pulaski National Monument, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.