THE HONORIS CAUSA WEBSITE profiles the forty-one Confederate veterans and four pro-Confederate British men who received Sewanee’s highest honor before 1918.

A production of the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, it speaks to the Project’s core mission “to gather and give a more complete historical account” of the University of the South and of “how slavery and its legacies have marked” the University’s long history.

The 1957 list of honorary degree recipients both expressed and celebrated the “Lost Cause,” a campaign organized and led by white women and men starting in the 1890s to honor and memorialize Confederates as American heroes and to denounce and suppress any argument for the role of slavery in causing the Civil War.

The tributes to the many Confederates among the University’s honorees reveal one way this legacy of slavery long influenced life on Sewanee’s campus. True to the teachings of the Lost Cause, the Confederate honorees cited in 1957, recognized only for their military service, effectively state that secession and the Confederacy could be remembered without reference to slavery or treason to the United States. The role of these men as slaveholders and their complicity in human bondage are unmentioned, further demonstrating the University leadership’s argument in the mid-1950s for the nobility and gallantry of the Lost Cause.