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ööCIVIL WAR HISTORY ment that emancipation forced upon slaves, masters, free blacks, and nonslaveholding whites alike. Although Drago makes effective use of public records, newspaper accounts, and, particularly, the Congressional investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, his sparse use of the Freedmen's Bureau records at the National Archives constitutes a serious flaw. No modern study of Southern blacks during Reconstruction can risk neglecting such an invaluable source. Joseph P. Reidy University of Maryland Godand General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind. By Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. Pp. 158. $12.95.) To Professor Connelly and Ms. Bellows the Lost Cause is the "essence" of "the southern mind"—"an awareness of defeat, alienation from the national experience, and a sense of separation from American ideals" (p. 137). In this slender volume of four chapters they survey and analyze the Lost Cause "mentality" in many manifestations, from 1865 to the present. As readers of Professor Connelly's The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (1977) will recall, unreconstructed Confederate veterans (mostly Virginians) tarred Lee's lieutenant, General James Longstreet, with culpability for the Gettysburg disaster, thereby clearing Lee from association with defeat. The next generation of southern writers and historians represented Lee as the embodiment of the Old South's noblest virtues and simultaneously as a paradoxical "nationalist" (for he hated slavery and hesitated to leave the federal army in 1861) . As such, Yankees could accept Lee as a model for manhood; southerners could do the same, yet also perceive in Lee their own honor and tragedy. Thus the sections were reconciled, even as "Virginia won the Civil War." All this (and a great deal more about southern fiction and historiography ) is recapitulated in the first three chapters. A long last chapter examines the Lost Cause's persistence since World War II. While the authors concede the loss of much which distinguished the region, they argue that southerners remain different in their "folk culture" and their memory of defeat. That non-southerners continue to insist (for their own mysterious reasons) upon a distinct Dixie also fuels myth and reinforces southerners' sense of separateness. As recently as the 1970s a spate of "good ol' boy" movies reaffirmed the "mystique of Dixie individualism." The phenomenal rise of "born again" Christian fundamentalism, too (a "southern protestantization of America") is evidence of the South's continued power. The authors' most extraordinary claim, however, is that "for the average southerner . . . country music is the great modern expression of the Lost Cause mentality" (p. 146). BOOK REVIEWS89 Nashville's lyrics of excess, despair, and redemption express the eccentricity and paradox at the heart of southern "character." Scholars familiar with the large bibliography of southern literature, popular culture, and mythmaking will appreciate in God and General Longstreet a useful summary and an imaginative synthesis. Connelly and Bellows periodize and label the phases of the South's peculiar evolution in the American imagination better than any of their many predecessors , I believe. In the last chapter, however, "Lost Cause" seems hopelessly entangled in the related but (I would submit) separate matter of southern identity. Logic breaks down and evidence gives way to assertion—for example, the connection of country music to a collective (if unarticulated) memory of defeat. One able researcher in the sociology of country music has argued persuasively that in recent decades the music has come to represent ^ss more than region. Moreover, how could Civil War scholars connect a music largely created by mountaineers , many without doubt of Unionist extraction, to the flatlanders' Lost Cause? Or more fundamentally, how, a dozen years after the appearance of David Hackett Fischer's Historians' Fallacies, could historians write seriously about matters (or anti-matters) so metaphysical as "mind," "character," and "essence"? Jack Temple Kirby Miami University (Ohio) The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century. By Milton Rugoff. (New York: Harper & Row, 1981. Pp. 653. $19.95.) The idea of a family biography is a splendid one, and Rugoff has superb subjects in Lyman Beecher and his eleven children. While each is worth knowing as an individual, their collective story provides a stunning...

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