Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory by Christopher C. Moore

Abstract

Reviewed by: Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory by Christopher C. Moore Paul Yandle Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory. By Christopher C. Moore. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2019. Pp. x, 300.) Christopher Moore’s work, published as part of the University of Tennessee Press’s series America’s Baptists, stands at an intersection of historiographies, informed by scholars of white southern memory including Fitzhugh Brundage and David Blight as well as historians of American religion and nineteenth-century culture such as Mark Noll and Beth Barton Schweiger. Part biography and part survey of J. William Jones’s parallel careers as Baptist clergyman and Lost Cause apologist, Apostle of the Lost Cause traces how Jones’s roles developed in tandem, beginning with his days as a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in the late 1850s. Jones’s original plan for his life—to serve as a missionary in Canton, China—was permanently interrupted by the Civil War. Ordained in the summer of 1860, he received his appointment to Canton and was scheduled to set sail that December. When South Carolina seceded from the Union, however, Jones’s mission board delayed his departure, and he took a temporary appointment at a Baptist church in his home county in Virginia. When that state decided to leave the Union, Jones became first a Confederate chaplain and later an army evangelist, a role that tied his financial support directly to Southern Baptists. Destined to stay in the United States, Jones became pastor in 1866 of a Baptist church in Lexington, Virginia, the town where Robert E. Lee settled after accepting the presidency of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University). Working as one of the clergy who served on rotation as chaplain at the school, Jones got to know Lee and his family. His acquaintance with the Lees led him to his alternate career as a Lost Causer, which began with his publication of a biography of Lee after Lee’s death in 1870. For the remainder of the nineteenth century and well into the first decade of the twentieth, Moore pursued his twin careers with vigor, his peripatetic life in the Southern Baptist Convention interspersed with his publication of defenses of the Lost Cause. Beyond his own publications, Jones’s work with [End Page 55] the pro-Confederate Southern Historical Society, which included a full-time position for a few years after Reconstruction, marked his determination to build a foundation of sanitized and vetted information upon which he hoped future historians would rely. Early in his work, Moore reveals his two primary goals for his study of Jones. One is to present Jones’s work as a Southern Baptist as a challenge to the scholarly argument that the popularity of Lost Cause literature reflected a muting of doctrinal differences among southern white Protestants that began during the Civil War and continued afterwards. A second is to reveal how Jones spanned the transition between two often-cited Lost Cause iterations discussed by Thomas Connelly and Barbara Bellows. The first, “Inner Lost Cause,” common in the years immediately after the war, largely involved a spirited proclamation of the superiority of the Confederate Army and its leadership over its northern counterparts. The second, “National Lost Cause,” centered on the construction of a historical narrative that would, Jones and others hoped, allow younger generations to participate in the larger life of the United States while remaining unapologetically true in heart to the Confederacy. Moore concludes from examining Jones that scholars have overestimated the degree to which Protestant denominations merged efforts toward promoting the Lost Cause in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a Southern Baptist confronted daily with the immediacy of death during the war, Jones, like most of his Protestant colleagues, was able to found common ground with other Protestant denominations, trading preaching duties and, if they so desired, referring newly converted soldiers to chaplains of other denominations amid the periods of revival that took place in the army camps in which he served. Moore argues, however, that Jones remained a champion of Baptists...