The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (review)

The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Pp. 240. $29.95.)

While this review was being prepared, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published a full-page manifesto--emanating from the Virginia Division, Sons of the Confederate Veterans--declaring that, "from this day forward through eternity," April would be celebrated in the state as "Confederate History and Heritage Month." After hailing the moral purity of Dixie's struggle for independence and lauding the heroism of those who had defended the commonwealth's "sacred soil," the proclamation reaffirmed the Sons' commitment to "teach the true history of the South to future generations." Prompted by ongoing clashes with Virginia's governor, Jim Gilmore, the SCV's rhetorical flourishes reflected an obvious fact: the emotions aroused by the "late unpleasantness" continue to shape attitudes and events, 136 years after the guns fell silent at Appomattox.

The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History critically (and, at times, acerbically) assesses the origins of views such as those expressed by the Sons. Coedited by Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, the book consists of nine essays that probe various aspects of the Confederate mystique and its enduring appeal. Nolan sets the tone in the lead chapter, presenting a point-by-point rebuttal of the major tenets of the Lost Cause creed and denouncing it as, in essence, a fallacious alibi concocted and promulgated by men who had led the slave states into a futile, disastrous rebellion. Gallagher sustains this argument by emphasizing the postwar role of Jubal A. Early, a second-rate and oft-defeated Confederate officer, in elevating the military reputations of fellow Virginians Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. ("Stonewall") Jackson to idolatrous heights--while at the same time unjustly denigrating the Union's ultimate success as the triumph of numbers over valor, of brutal attrition over tactical skill.

LaSalle Corbell Pickett (Gen. George Pickett's widow) receives unsympathetic treatment in these pages as well. According to historian Lesley J. Gordon, Mrs. Pickett's postbellum career as a writer and Lost Cause icon was marked by a curious admixture of charlatanry and self-delusion, traits that evidently facilitated her rise to fame in an impoverished South that welcomed her heavily fictionalized accounts of antebellum gentility and wartime romance.

Lloyd Hunter strikes a similar note in a chapter dealing with the cult-like characteristics of the activities of the United Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and similar groups that emerged during the 1880s and 1890s. Hunter maintains that, through adroit manipulation of quasi-religious rituals, symbols, and relics (together with hagiographic exaltation of Lee, Jackson, Davis and other newfound saints or martyrs), these groups created an enduring "Lost Cause religion" that exerted a potent and, as a rule, baleful influence on Southern society.

These almost unrelievedly negative accounts are counterbalanced, to some degree, by several essays that focus on developments at the state level. Analyzing post-Reconstruction politics in South Carolina, for example, Charles J. Holden contends that one-time Confederate cavalry chieftain Wade Hampton employed Lost Cause appeals to rally electoral support from poor white yeomen who might otherwise have opposed his program (which included continued recognition of the civil and political rights of the state's black citizens). Keith S. Bohannon provides a wealth of factual detail with reference to Confederate reunions in Georgia from 1885 to 1895. Through study of the speeches delivered at those events, he suggests the existence of a complex interplay of progressive "New South" themes with persisting reactionary sentiments. Peter Carmichael's inquiry into the motives and conduct of one group of Lost Cause advocates in Virginia is more unambiguously favorable in its findings. Emphasizing the role of younger ex-Confederates (college-educated men born between 1831 and 1843), Carmichael characterizes this so-called "last generation" as aspiring, entrepreneurial reformers...