The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The “Great Truth” about the “Lost Cause.” (review)

OK, class. What caused the Civil War? After a half-century of historiography and the words of the secessionists themselves, the debate should be over. No slavery, no war. And yet, regardless of latitude, you will find many, perhaps millions of, Americans with views of the war and Reconstruction not far removed from those presented in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The disconnect between scholarship and public perception results from our national ignorance about race, and how scholars, for all their best intentions, have presented the war’s origins and aftermath.

James W. Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta have toiled long and hard to crack the myths of the war and Reconstruction, and this collection is their latest effort. They have gathered an excellent collection of sources—many familiar, some not, from the antebellum era through the secession crisis, the war, the Reconstruction era, the nadir of race relations (1890–1940), and the Civil Rights era to the present. Roughly 70 percent of the material deals with the one-hundred-year period ending in 1877. The editors frame each chronological chapter with an introduction and provide headnotes for each selection. When they use ellipses to indicate a break in the document, they helpfully inform the reader about the nature of the material they have excised. They supplement the documents with images from the built environment, cartoons, memorabilia, and illustrations. These work particularly well in a classroom setting.

I wish the book were shorter. I know the collection represents a fraction of what the editors could have used. But they seem too eager in some places to pile on documents to advance a particular point. There is no need, for example, to include excerpts from all eleven seceding states reiterating that slavery was the paramount motivation for secession. A slimmer book would make the collection even more attractive for classroom use.

The documents highlight the shifting and shifty arguments of white southerners and the occasional northern sympathizer. The secessionists were forthright in their acknowledgment of slavery’s central role in defining southern civilization. After the war, with slavery dead, the argument shifted to states’ rights, which remained a persistent theme into the twenty-first century. White supremacy was the connecting thread between antebellum and postbellum writers.

White supremacy became slavery by another name. It was an explanation that found great resonance in the North, much more than the abandoned institution of slavery would have enjoyed. Robert E. Lee was right: “It is true that the people of the South, in common with a large majority of the people of the North and West, are for obvious reasons, inflexibly opposed to any system of laws that would place the political power of the country in the hands of the Negro race” (255).

The collection debunks the increasingly popular neo-Confederate notion that African Americans willingly took up arms for Rebel armies. Let’s see: I’ll pick up a gun and go out and shoot the guys who are here to liberate me. That this bizarre legend has grown is a testament not so much to the effectiveness of neo-Confederate propaganda as to the ignorance of many white Americans about the Civil War and, particularly, the history of their black neighbors. This unknowing has led white Americans to believe that blacks were content as slaves, were loyal to their masters during the war, and were badly misled by white interlopers after the war. Many white Americans elide the race issue, preferring stories of reconciliation to tales of retribution.

The main shortcoming of the collection is that it is incomplete. Our problem with race and historical interpretation is not solely a southern phenomenon: it is an American dilemma. It is not that northerners adopted the southern interpretation of the war and Reconstruction. They actively participated in its creation. For the period after...