Your Heritage Will Still Remain: Racial Identity and Mississippi's Lost Cause by Michael J. Goleman (review)

On September 17, 2017, Alabama's Republican candidate for Senate, Roy Moore, a former judge, surprised many Americans by suggesting that our nation was better back in the days of slavery. "I think it [America] was great at the time when families were united—even though we had slavery—they cared for one another. … Our families were strong, our country had a direction" (Los Angeles Times, December 8, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/95396983-132.html). Historians of the South likely heard in this statement an echo of the Lost Cause narrative. As numerous scholars have amply demonstrated, this narrative had four main tenets: the South's cause, states' rights, was just; the Confederacy lost because it was overwhelmed by northern military might; black people were innately unsuited to freedom and had been better off in slavery, which was a benevolent institution; and Confederates were not traitors but the heroic defenders of American values and liberties. Former Confederates crafted this ideology in the 1860s to vindicate their beliefs and actions, but their descendants expanded its reach in the early twentieth century into all sectors of American society. How it emerged and why it continues to shape many contemporary white Americans' understandings of their own identity are the central concerns of Michael J. Goleman's brief yet insightful and accessible book.

Goleman's work complements the extensive literature on the Lost Cause by focusing on its evolution in a single, very influential state: Mississippi. The book begins in the 1850s to establish the state and national context. The remaining five chapters trace how white Mississippians constructed their version of events, adapted it during the years of Reconstruction, and maintained it into the Progressive era. He shows how the significance of prominent residents like Jefferson Davis blended with distinctive events like the siege of Vicksburg to shape the way a majority of white Mississippians viewed their relationship to the Confederacy and their particular place in the social and political landscape of the postbellum United States. He also reveals how these elements of Confederate heritage unique to Mississippi shaped white residents' "national social identity" (p. 134). Applying the methods of social theorists like Henri Tajfel and John Turner, who are interested in the creation of in-groups versus out-groups, Goleman examines how his subjects formed and reformed positive identities for themselves by constructing negative identities for others. For example, during the Civil War, white Confederates in Mississippi cast a wide range of out-groups, not just Union soldiers, into the role of enemy. But what matters most to Goleman is white Mississippians' use of the Lost Cause in the late nineteenth century to cast themselves as the nation's true patriots.

Goleman is careful to acknowledge divisions among white Mississippians and between white and black constructions of the past. He draws chiefly on white-authored sources such as speeches, books, letters, and newspapers and incorporates black voices primarily in the final chapter, where he summarizes the development of a black counternarrative to the Lost Cause and the transformation of black culture in the emergence of the Delta blues. Although his analysis ends in the 1910s, Goleman argues in the conclusion that the Lost Cause shaped white Mississippians' response to the civil rights movement, especially the violence they directed at black activists like Medgar Evers and James Meredith. Finally, Goleman asserts that the Lost Cause continues to "define the state and some of its people" today (p. 131). Readers will easily recognize those elements of the Lost Cause in numerous other states.