Arguing with cosplay Twitter Confederates this month has taught me a lot about not just how ex-Confederates sold the Lost Cause myth to decades of Americans, but also how current Confederate protagonists defend their white supremacy and treason. A thread...

Those of us who study the Civil War and Reconstruction know the losers wrote the history and did an amazing job selling themselves as the victims. The Lost Cause myth was pushed by former Confederates, their families, and Southern "historians" to save their honor and reputations.

Doing everything they could to paint themselves as the defenders of the Constitution, of freedom, of American righteousness took decades of inflitrating schools, building monuments, and telling their stories. They literally white washed anything bad from American memory.

No treason. No slavery. The 'benevolent master and loyal slave.' Yankee aggression. Lincoln the tyrant. Defending the Constitution and Southern honor. "State's rights."

This was their mantra. Their narrative. Their "history." And most Americans have learned it that way.

And as we historians have pushed back against the Lost Cause myth, Confederates have doubled down. Groups like the Daughters or the Abbeville Institute have tried to write "scholarly" work that continues to defend the Confederacy. This is what these trolls use as "proof."

They'll throw things at you like the Corwin Amendment. Or "Lincoln was a racist who believed in recolonization." Or scream about Seward. Or some peace commission.

But it's all a deflection. A ruse. A way to get you to pick nits and ignore the true causes of the war.

These gotcha tricks are easy to fall victim to, and eventually you're 50 tweets deep into an argument about silly shit. That's the point. That's their strategy. And it works. But it's intellectually dishonest, ahistorical, and cheap. They know they're wrong. And so do we.

Anyway this epiphany brought to you by my monkey mind and this hellscape of a site. Confederates have always lied about the Civil War. They always will. It's our job as historians to break the myths and tell the real story. For Union and for Liberty.