The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History.

Edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, c. 2000. Pp. [viii], 231. $29.95, ISBN 0-253-33822-0.)

French historian and cultural critic Ernest Renan once wrote that nations and cultures are fashioned as much from what they forget as from what they remember. White southerners have certainly forged their own identity from equal parts memory and forgetfulness, a theme fully explored in the growing literature on Confederate commemoration and the "Lost Cause" movement. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan's collection of essays continues the discussion of this important phenomenon.

Several of the essays in this collection will be particularly welcomed by teachers of southern and Civil War history who seek to shatter the dearly held myths of contemporary Confederate apologists. Indeed, no better essay could be found to pass along to an enthusiastic neo-Confederate than Nolan's "The Anatomy of a Myth." The essay is well named. Nolan carefully dissects the body of Lost Cause tradition, refuting claims about the lawfulness of secession, the near perfection of Confederate soldiers and leaders, and the continuing notion that superior northern numbers and manufactures doomed the South to defeat from the beginning. Two other essays, Brooks D. Simpson's very fine discussion of Grant's generalship (and the effort of Lost Cause apologists to denigrate it) and Jeffry D. Wert's essay on James Longstreet and the Lost Cause, pursue similar themes.

In this same vein, Gallagher's contribution examines, as have a number of scholars, the role that Jubal A. Early played in the "struggle to control the public memory of the war" (p. 36). Gallagher goes further than previous scholars, however, by examining the twentieth-century legacy of Early's work, suggesting convincingly that what might be called Civil War pop culture (paintings, magazines, novels, films) have all adopted Early's vision of the conflict.

The most sophisticated essay in this collection is Charles J. Holden's "'Is Our Love of Wade Hampton Foolishness?': South Carolina and the Lost Cause." Holden looks at the understudied topic of social and political fissures within the Lost Cause movement itself, providing a very different model for the development of Confederate memory in the career and cultural image of South Carolina's Wade Hampton. Holden's analysis shows how the Lost Cause image of Hampton only fully emerged after the old general himself disappeared from the political stage, thus allowing the infusion of a variety of new meanings into his image. Essays by Keith S. Bohannon and Peter S. Carmichael are concerned, respectively, with the celebration of the Confederacy in Georgia and Virginia, and both also deal with how late nineteenth-century politics intertwined with the rhetoric and ritual of the Lost Cause.

Thematically, these essays tend to focus heavily on how the former Confederates shaped battlefield memories of the conflict rather than exploring the larger cultural meaning of the war. It is unfortunate that only one essay, by Lesley J. Gordon, focuses exclusively on the crucial role of women in the Lost Cause movement. The argument could be made, after all, that groups like the Ladies Memorial Association and the United Daughters of the Confederacy influenced far more white southerners in their view of the war than did the embittered scribblings of Early and his cohorts. The final essay in the collection, by Lloyd A. Hunter, does attempt to reflect on the larger meaning of the conflict and the religious uses of Confederate memory in southern society. However, students of the Lost Cause movement will immediately note, as Hunter himself admits, that his essay leans very heavily on previous works by Charles Reagan Wilson and Gaines M. Foster.

William Faulkner once called the postbellum South a land "peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts." The essays in this volume point the way toward further understanding of these ghosts and even the possibility that they might, at last, be put to rest.

W. SCOTT POOLE

College of Charleston