| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, editors. The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2000. Pp. v, 231. $29.95.

This collection of well-focused essays by nine historians addresses continuing historiographical and popular interest in the compelling symbols of the South's idealization of the Confederate experience. The essays explore the functions of the Lost Cause mythology, looking at leading historical figures who played parts in the legend, continuities between prewar and postwar attitudes, the political and ideological divisions among white southerners who otherwise affirmed the main arguments of the Lost Cause, and the resurgence of neo-Confederate ideas in the contemporary South. 1

The Lost Cause myth emerged full blown after the Civil War, with its advocates portraying the Confederacy as doomed from the beginning because of the industrial and demographic resources of the North. Southerners, according to the legend, fought gallantly for the idea of states' rights, leaving a notable record of courage and skill in battle and unrelenting sacrifice on the home front. Coeditor Alan T. Nolan is aggressive in attacking the main points of the Lost Cause ideology, arguing that it was an intentional effort to rationalize secession and war while ignoring real historical facts, including the weaknesses of antebellum slaveholding society, the centrality of slavery to the Confederacy, and the internal divisions among whites during the war. Nolan's essay is compelling, and he achieves his goal of sweeping away the factual underpinnings of the neo-Confederate view of Civil War history. He is a bit too adamant, though, about the "factuality" of history in positing the falseness of "myth" and the reality of "history." Lloyd Hunter's essay on the religious meanings of the Lost Cause is more modulated than Nolan's in seeing that myth itself has a history that needs to be understood. Hunter's contribution as well is to discuss the Lost Cause in terms of the sacralization of southern culture. . . .

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