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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 glimpse of American culture in transition from "self-denial to selfindulgence " (p. 469). For all his reputation as a minister, Lyman Beecher knew more failure than success. His greatest legacy proved to be the children whose souls he seared with the fire of an unforgiving creed. All the boys became ministers and three of the four girls became prominent in reform movements . Religion dominated their lives as it had Lyman's but it was no longer the faith of their father. As Rugoff shows, the children "all abandoned or even repudiated his church and its pitiless tenets" (p. 297) in favor of a theology grounded in love rather than fear. The change was in large measure a survival instinct. Two of the boys committed suicide; several of the others underwent emotional crises for which the harsh doctrines of Lyman's Calvinism provided no solace and much agony. Few escaped a reputation for eccentricity of one fashion or another in later years, the product of what Rugoff labels "the Beecher rites de passage." Rugoff delineates his characters well and weaves their relationships 90CIVIL war history together skillfully. He rescues the lesser-known Beechers from obscurity and offers fresh insights into the familiar careers of Lyman, Harriet, Henry Ward, and Catharine. He discusses in detail their role in a variety of issues, especially slavery, civil rights, and the women's movement. Specialists may be put off by his lack of references to current scholarly literature in those areas and by the minimal notes and bibliography. Nevertheless , the analysis is informed and intelligent, the balance impressive . Rugoff's literary criticism of Harriet's lesser novels, while not always convincing, sheds valuable light in a neglected corner. Throughout the book religion is the leitmotif binding the most disparate of subjects together. From Rugoff's group portrait emerges a clear sense of why Calvinism was not a religion for America. The fear of hell made life a living hell for Lyman's own children; to other Americans the rigors of self-denial simply became irrelevant to their ambitions. So tortuous a road to salvation could not compete with the promise of material success. It was the gift of newer ministers like Henry Ward Beecher to sense this change and provide it a theology that detached the world and the flesh from the devil. Much has been written about this transformation but few have depicted it with such graphic clarity as Rugoff. The research is impressive, the writing graceful. This is a rewarding, often compelling book, worth the attention of scholars or anyone interested in nineteenth-century America. Maury Klein...

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