Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (review)

Abstract

As a boy growing up in Montgomery, Alabama, about five blocks from the first White House of the Confederacy, one could not escape all the memorabilia about the War between the States or what is called the Lost Cause. We used to joke that white men kept too much Confederate money in their mattresses and white women had seen Gone With the Wind too many times. At that time, I never really grasped the full implications of the Southern whites' attempts at ennobling themselves and their families. The rhetoric of Confederate general Bradley Johnson captures the sentiment of the Lost Cause: "a glorious, organic civilization destroyed by an avaricious 'industrial society' determined to wipe out its cultural foes" (257). One would think that the antebellum South was the center of the civilized world. It wasn't, but revisionist history has a way of making its past look respectable and glorious. The "war of ideas" that Edward Pollard warns about in The Lost Cause continued for decades. In the post-Civil War period, there was no shortage of journalists trying to make a buck writing about the lost honor, idyllic race relations, and noble intentions of the antebellum South.