NARRATOR
In early 1873, a series of articles began to appear in the New York Tribune. Black lawmakers in South Carolina, the newspaper declared, were plundering the treasury. All through that winter, fresh accusations surfaced. The charges were highly exaggerated, but they contained an element of truth.

FONER
What's happening is that a lot more money is flowing through these state governments; they're doing a lot more things than the governments had in the past. And also, a lot of the Republican legislators are not people with any significant livelihood, other than being an office holder. And so there begins to develop this sense of, "Well, make some money while you can."

NARRATOR
In the North, corruption was just as widespread -- but South Carolina, the only state with a black majority legislature, was an easy target. The accusations fueled anti-black feeling in the North, and added to a growing sense that Reconstruction had been a terrible mistake. That fall, frightening news from Wall Street gripped the North, and eclipsed the troubled conversation about Reconstruction. The nation's biggest banking house declared bankruptcy, and the North's overheated economy crashed. Thousands of businesses failed; a million people were thrown out of work. In the terrible depression that followed, Northerners had little patience for the plight of Southern blacks. Increasingly, they were falling under the spell of a more romantic idea of the South -- a growing legend of a lost civilization.

AYERS
White northerners begin to sympathize with the ideals of the white South. Yes, there was a time in the United States when life was not all about money. Yes, there was a time when there was an aristocracy. And you find that white northerners as well as white southerners love these ideas, deep into the twentieth century.

NARRATOR
It came to be called the Lost Cause. The white South's own version of its history became a kind of civic religion. White southerners began to build memorials, consecrate battlefields -- it was their way of dealing with loss.

FAUST
Eighteen percent of white southern men of military age are killed in the war. Eighty thousand widows in Alabama, applying for support and aid. One of the things they want to do is, simply on an emotional level, cope with all that death and somehow reclaim the meaning of those deaths. But to honor the dead you have to enhance the cause. So this wasn't simply about the loved ones, it was also about the cause for which they died.

AYERS
The Lost Cause is a celebration of what white southerners see as the best of the Confederacy: its nobility, its Christian virtues, its leadership, the loyalty of its men.

BLIGHT
They basically began to forge the Confederate Lost Cause as not a story about loss but a story about victory. They might have lost the war, but they were now winning the ultimate victory, over control of their own society and against Reconstruction.

NARRATOR
Democrats took back power in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas. White Southerners called it "Redemption." Many of the elections were won through violence and intimidation. White Northerners did nothing to stop it.

FAUST
I think a key part of it is race, and the basic agreement, North and South, among white Americans, about the need for subordination of African Americans.

NARRATOR
Lured by the myth of the old South, Northern tourists began to flock to the moss-covered plantations of Georgia, Virginia, Florida. Travel guides suggested that whites and freedmen had learned to live together in harmony. "Nothing can be more beautiful than a cotton field," one travel writer declared, "when the snowy globes of wool are ready for picking, and the swart laborers, with sacks suspended from their shoulders, wander between the rows."