Napoleon, the Lost Cause of the South, and the Trump verdict

Myths may persist, even when their purveyors lose. Sometimes they matter.

A typical caricature of Napoleon Bonaparte, as seen by the English. But is it accurate? (Print by Fredéric Dubois, The British Museum)

Ask an American to give you one fact about Napoleon Bonaparte — legendary military leader, emperor of France, architect of a civil code embraced even now by scores of nations around the globe — and chances are good that you’ll hear this: He was short.

Actually, though, he was not. Most historians of the 19^th century now agree that Napoleon stood about 5 feet 6 inches tall, which was average for a European of his time. The myth of his diminutiveness was almost certainly the creation of one man: the popular British cartoonist James Gillray, who invited mockery of England’s enemy by drawing him as a raging little fellow. That image has far outlived either the subject or its creator, even lending the name “Napoleon complex” to a purported psychological diagnosis, in which shorter men are supposed to be overly aggressive to compensate for their size — a notion that research so far hasn’t backed up.

For the famous Frenchman, it's a minor defamation, really. Napoleon’s stature in no way diminishes the consequence of his conquests, any more than Abraham Lincoln’s homeliness renders less admirable his preservation of the Union. But illusions and deceptions can linger, and not always without consequence. Today’s lies can become tomorrow’s history, their impact skewing the principles and practices of societies for generations.

Consider, for example, the myth of the Lost Cause — the notion, still relevant and embraced by many today, that the goal of the rebellion that brought the American Civil War was actually rooted not in the defense of slavery but in the love of liberty. In that conception, the war was an economic and political dispute, not a moral one, and it was mostly caused by aggressive northerners who didn’t understand the generally beneficent effect of slavery. Southerners, the defenders say, were fighting mainly for the rights of states, which were guaranteed by the Constitution.

That notion isn’t harmless sentimentalism or an understandable expression of regional pride by the descendants of Old Dixie; it’s a dangerous lie that echoes today in the bigotry that still bedevils our society in the 21^st century. And it stands as a warning that we can’t be sluggish in the fight against those who are as eager to distort reality today as the defeated Confederates were about their contemporary events in the 1860s and after.

To be clear, then, about what happened in America eight score and four years ago, as Lincoln might have said: It was not a principled stand for states’ rights that prompted 11 southern states to mount up armies against their own country, and the war did not arise because northerners were jealous of southerners’ economic strength. No, the South left the Union to fight for slavery. The founding documents of the Confederacy aren’t sly about it. On Dec. 24, 1860, delegates to South Carolina’s secession convention cited “an increasing hostility on the part of non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery” as the state’s justification for leaving the Union; 16 days later, Mississippi’s resolution likewise declared, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”

Immediately after the war, though, the conflict was recast by the losing side as something more akin to a valiant struggle of chivalric people who had been living in grace and gentility in a society that had actually improved the lives of those held in bondage. The term “Lost Cause” was first used in a book by a Virginia journalist, Edward A. Pollard, who wrote in 1866 that the “system of servitude in the South… was really the mildest in the world,” which “elevated the African” to “a world of cheerfulness and contentment.” Never mind the forced labor, the whippings, the rape and sexual abuse of slaves, the denial of education, the destruction of Black families. Denying that then resonates in a nostalgic view of the antebellum South today.

In the decades after the Civil War, the notion took root that Southern life pre-war wasn’t so bad, and the insurrection that tried to preserve it not so evil. That distortion’s popularity might be explained because both sides were eager to paper over their differences in order to unify the divided nation, to take advantage of the growth of the Industrial Age. Besides, southern economic and political power remained in the hands of the former enslavers, who wouldn’t wish to be depicted as defenders of an immoral institution. That’s how monuments eventually were erected to those who led a rebellion against the United States, and military bases named in honor of soldiers who took up arms against the country they had sworn to defend.

It was only after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police in 2020 that the nation really began to reckon with that misappropriation of history. Monuments to the Confederacy were pulled down in dozens of cities, and military installations were renamed. Yet now, just four years after that seemingly seminal moment, some of the changes of the post-Floyd moment are being reversed: A number of schools in the South, for example, are reverting to their old names honoring slavery’s defenders, and fierce pushback is forcing a retreat from institutional initiatives to encourage diversity, equity and inclusion.

The resilience of the Lost Cause arguments was clear last year when Florida officials ordered the history of American racism de-emphasized in the curriculum of public schools. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was then running for president, resurrected one of those old arguments when he suggested that the new school standards would probably teach “that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” Ah, yes: slavery was a tool for economic advancement for Black people.

Bad as flawed history lessons are, though, there’s more harm than that when lies are perpetrated for generations. For example: Might the systemic racism that has held sway in America more than a century and a half after the emancipation of the slaves have been diminished if society had demanded more remorse, or even atonement, for the sin of slavery? Did the eagerness to protect the pride of the South, to overlook the offenses of those who attacked the very foundation of our republic, allow the children of the Confederacy — and all the rest of us — to embrace a limited view of our responsibility to each other, which even now impedes efforts at the federal level to promote economic justice and protect the natural environment? Turning away from the truth is never a good idea.

So we come to the lies of today. Nowhere is the echo of the Lost Cause more apparent than in Donald Trump’s reformulation of the prosecution that made him a convicted felon, and nowhere are the consequences of that fiction clearer than in the the outrageous reactions offered by his partisans and right-wing media outlets to this week’s guilty verdicts.

Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts in a New York State court could be seen as a triumph of American jurisprudence — because it shows that even a person who held the most powerful role in the nation can be held to the standard of the law based upon the judgment of 12 ordinary citizens. But the verdict produced a torrent of malicious deception not only from the convicted ex-president — we could expect nothing less, of course — but also from every corner of his political support system.

Trump repeated his claim that the trial was “rigged” and called the judge “a man who can’t put two sentences together.” He said the verdict indicated that America has become “a banana republic … a shithole.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who eagerly flaunts his Christian faith (which teaches, as does Judaism, that adultery is a sin), said nothing of the jury’s finding that Trump criminally paid hush money to cover up his affair with a star of pornographic movies, but rather depicted the trial, rather than the crime, as an affront to American values. He said the prosecution was diminishing Americans’ faith in “our system of justice itself.” Key House Republicans vowed to go after the prosecutors in hearings next month.

Eight Republican senators said they would try to block any legislation that wasn’t “directly relevant to the safety of the American people” because, they claimed, the White House was actually to blame for the prosecution by the Manhattan District Attorney, and by extension, then, the jury’s verdict. U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, who hopes Trump picks him to run for vice president, claimed that the American judicial system “hunts Republicans while it protects Democrats” — which surely would surprise Hunter Biden and New Jersey’s Bob Menendez, a Democratic senator now on trial on felony corruption charges.

On Fox News, host Greg Gutfield claimed the verdict was a result of a “conscious collusion of allies that came together with a private strategy to eliminate a common, shared adversary,” and commentator Laura Ingraham said it was the work of “vindictive, far-left tyrants.” Fox and its imitators relentlessly attacked the verdict as a Biden-orchestrated effort to stop Trump, ignoring the underlying charges and the fact that the jury that reached the verdict was accepted by Trump’s lawyer.

To those of us who see in the Trump verdict an affirmation of the rule of law in America, these reactions seem outlandish. Americans should be proud of a system in which a jury of ordinary citizens can hold even a former and perhaps future president to account for breaking the law. But whether or not this affects Trump’s chances of returning to the White House, there’s a lesson for us in this episode’s similarity to the Lost Cause of the South.

The tenacity of the myth of the heroic Confederacy shows that even bad ideas die hard, and that being on the winning side of a huge national argument doesn’t assure the defeat of deception. So even if Joe Biden again defeats Donald Trump — as any reading of fair history generations from now will say he did in 2020 — we should expect the dupery of the Trump era to be with us for a long time. Trumpism will outlast the man.

But we can take hope from the fact that the line that Trump and his supporters are pushing to advance his candidacy — namely, that you can’t trust American justice — was revealed in a Manhattan courtroom to be untrue, at least for now. For all our nation’s failures, it remains a place where the rule of law can be triumphant. That’s why the work to protect democracy will stretch beyond November, but why defeating Donald Trump is an essential step in that process.

Some enduring myths, after all, are trivial: Napoleon’s height matters not a whit anymore. Some matter more: The notion that the Civil War was a political dispute rooted in the South’s defense of states’ rights has made it harder, even these generations later, to achieve progress on social justice.

But progress has been made, in fact, notwithstanding our countrymen who still fly Confederate flags and mutter racist oaths. And a nation that weathered a Civil War and made slow but inexorable progress toward justice in the years since can surely survive a reprehensible demagogue now.

The Trump verdict was, in fact, a shining vindication of the rule of law in our country. It reminds us that America is far from a lost cause, as we need to be sure future generations well understand.

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