V.   Immediately following the surrender at Appomattox, the US indicted 39 former officials and officers of the defeated Confederacy, most notably General Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, former Confederate president. But no former Confederate was ever prosecuted for treason against the United States.

In The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee, The Case Against an American Icon, author John Reeves contends that the post-war misplacement of the actual document indicting Lee serves as a proper metaphor for the loss of Americans' collective memory of hard truths surrounding the Confederacy, the War, and Lee's actions.

For most of the past 150 years, an intentional and pro-southern myth called "The Lost Cause" has eclipsed objective realities about the war era.  It is a destructive fabrication about a benevolent slave-based society, secession founded on "states' rights" and principle, and unjust conquest by a more muscular and populous northern oppressor.

In presenting Reeves' remarks at the National Archives in June 2018, Historic Matters suggests that this enterprising author is a party to a gradual, profound, and salutary evolution in the interpretation of a central, defining event of the American past.

(Historic Matters, vol. V)