Last week, while we were working on the latest episode of the show, something kind of incredible happened.

I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state,

which in 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days.

But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.

That is White House Chief of Staff John Kelly on Fox News, in his arguments that the cause of the Civil War was a failure to compromise,

and that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. Those are not new arguments. They're the achievement of a PR campaign that goes back 150 years.

It all began right as the Civil War ended. At that point, three things were absolutely clear to everybody. The Confederates had left the Union to keep slavery. Their leaders had failed, and the soldiers had lost the war.

But then, in this massive campaign that went on for decades, that story was entirely reversed, and a different version of the story emerged.

And it goes like this. The war was about states' rights. The leaders were great Christian martyrs, and the soldiers were triumphed heroes.

Historians call this version of the Civil War the lost cause, and today, we're going to punch it in the face.

I'm Jack Hit. I'm Changeri Kumanyika, and this is Uncivil, where we ransack America's history.

And show that the past ain't what it used to be.

So picture this. It's April 1865, the tail end of the Civil War.

Robert E. Lee has just lost a quarter of his army, and Union soldiers are running the rest of them ragged, chasing them around Virginia.

Lee knows he's done. He has to raise the white flag, so he meets with Union General Ulysses S. Grant at a house in Appomattox, Virginia, to work out the terms of surrender.

Back at their encampments, Confederate soldiers have handed over their weapons and a weightward from their leader.

Once the meeting with Grant is over, Lee sits down and finalizes his last order to his men, a kind of farewell address.

You would think that Lee might express regret that he and his men lost the war. Over 300,000 Confederate men have died, but he doesn't.

Instead, he says something kind of weird.

Defeat was not their fault.

That's Caroline Janie, professor of history at Purdue.

Defeat was at the hands of a union that had superior northern material and manpower.

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