Thomas E. Strunk (Xavier University)
In the American South’s political imagination during and after the American Civil War, Cato the Younger came to represent the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy. Perhaps the most prominent display of the South’s appropriation of Cato as defender of the Lost Cause is the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, which commemorates the Confederacy and Cato by quoting Lucan’s lines on the Roman civil war (49-45 BCE): victrix causa deis placuit sed victa Catoni (BC 1.128, “the victorious cause pleased the gods, but the lost cause pleased Cato”). Cato was indeed seen as a model of political behavior by Confederates during the Civil War. The Southern writer Edward Pollard frequently invoked Cato to strengthen Southern resistance as Union armies marched to victory. Cato’s suicide inspired at least one Confederate imitator, Edmund Ruffin, who several months after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox committed suicide rather than endure “Yankee rule” (Betty 1981). Ruffin’s conscious imitation of Cato revealed the enduring power of Cato’s suicide. Further, it reproduced the conflict over Cato’s memory as both patriot and traitor.
Although the Confederate monument at Arlington and its classical influences have garnered considerable attention (Miles 1971; Malamud 2009), Cato himself has largely been left aside from considerations of the Confederate reception of antiquity. William Wasta-Werner (2020) has done important work on Cato and the Confederacy, but this has largely been focused on the figure of Robert E. Lee. In this paper, I intend to build on Werner’s work with a special emphasis on Edward Pollard’s writings on the Lost Cause myth and the suicide of Edmund Ruffin in imitation of Cato. For both Pollard and Ruffin, I map out how they configured the idea of the Lost Cause and Cato as a model for it.
I conclude that while Cato and the fall of the Roman Republic were tempting paradigms for the defeated Confederacy, the paradigms fail in important ways. First, the Roman civil war was a war between factions over political power, in which the traditional libertas of Rome would be lost; the American civil war actually expanded and extended liberty by outlawing enslavement and was fought between distinct geographical boundaries with different laws and customs. The Lost Cause appropriation of Cato and Rome overlooks these historical distinctions. Further, the way the Romans remembered the civil war and Cato specifically served a different function than the Confederacy’s idea of the Lost Cause. Cato represented philosophical resolve and resistance to arbitrary political power and autocracy (Goar 1987; Drogula 2019); the Lost Cause was used to perpetuate dominance and arbitrary power over a subjugated people, enslaved and formerly enslaved Black Americans (Foster 1987; Gallagher and Nolan 2000). The use of Cato for the Lost Cause myth represents another instantiation of White Supremacy’s appropriation of the historical past to serve its own ends and provides a rare example of using Cato to justify the direct domination of others.