ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the first half dozen decades of the Cause's origins through newspaper coverage of the time as the Lost Cause grabbed hold of the imagination of both Northerners and Southerners, and then watched their grip loosen. It covers the period 1860–1914, a portion of what some historians define as the Long Nineteenth Century. The Constitution clearly believed an abstraction—the Lost Cause—was more important for it and its readers than the individuals involved in the Civil War. Several buttons from an old Confederate uniform of the "lost cause" were also produced and one was thrown into the time capsule by a reporter. The Tribune was known as the Chicago Tribune from 1860 to 1872 and the Chicago Daily Tribune from 1872 through 1914. The cause had been transformed from thoughts of vengeance and restoration into harmless and impotent poetry.
