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  • “Reawaken[ing] the Confederacy”: The Lost Cause and the Culture Wars
  • Erik J. Chaput (bio)
Nicole Maurantonio, Confederate Exceptionalism: Civil War Myth and Memory in the Twenty-First Century. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. 264 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $32.50.
Kevin M. Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 246 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $30.00.
Thomas J. Brown, Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 384 pp. Halftones, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.

In 1961, the poet, novelist, and literary critic Robert Penn Warren argued in a long meditation, a prose poem of sorts, that the Civil War was our “felt history—history lived in the national imagination . . . this fact is an index to the very complexity, depth, and fundamental significance of the event.” The story of the Civil War often found its way into Warren’s writing. His grandfather, a native of Kentucky, fought alongside the notorious Confederate commander Nathan Bedford Forrest. According to Warren, the Civil War was “an overwhelming and vital image of human, and national, experience,” for somewhere in our “bones,” most Americans had a wealth of “lessons.” As he noted in a later poem entitled “Shoes in Rain Jungle,” history is something we cannot “resign from” as much as we might want to try.1 Warren’s words were prescient in the early 1960s. But now, seventy years later, they have startling relevance for the current age. These lessons are playing out once again in our political culture.

More recently, historian David Blight, a student of Warren’s writings, argued that the legacy of the Civil War “sits like the giant sleeping dragon of American history ever ready to rise up when we do not expect it and strike us with unbearable fire.”2 In August 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, that dragon awoke. The civil religion of the Lost Cause emerged anew, manifesting itself in a politics of rage fueled by President Donald Trump’s rise to power. A [End Page 49] rally organized in opposition to a plan by local officials to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park in Charlottesville turned deadly. For white nationalists and neo-Confederates, the statue of Lee took on a symbolic status as a talisman against the forces of liberalism and modernity. Confederate battle flags dotted the landscape. James Alex Fields, Jr., a 20-year-old white supremacist, drove his car into a crowd in the streets of Charlottesville, killing 32-year-old antiracist protestor Heather Heyer and injuring nineteen others. The night before this horrible tragedy, a large crowd had gathered under the mantra of “Unite the Right,” circling around the statue of Thomas Jefferson on the campus of the University of Virginia and raising their torches high.

In the aftermath of the tragic events in Charlottesville, President Trump told reporters that there were “very fine people on both sides.” Trump, who built a part of his political base with besieged whites who were frightened of change and seeking a refuge in the color of their skin, refused to condemn the actions of those who trafficked in hate. Throughout his presidency, Trump endorsed the Confederate battle flag along with Confederate monuments and military bases named after Confederate leaders. This is in stark contrast to President Barack Obama, who, at the end of his presidency, maintained that the removal of the Confederate battle flag was a necessary “acknowledgment that the cause for which [Confederates] fought—the cause of slavery—was wrong, the imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong.”3 Trump prefers a different understanding, an understanding rooted in the tradition of the Lost Cause updated for the 21st century.

In his announcement signaling his official entrance into the 2020 presidential race, former vice president Joe Biden specifically cited Trump’s remarks as one of the central reasons he was joining the crowded Democratic primary field. “We are in the battle for the soul of this nation,” Biden said in a video message. “I believe history will...

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