Reviewed by: Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory by Christopher C. Moore Timothy Wesley Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory. By Christopher C. Moore. America's Baptists. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2019. Pp. x, 300. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-593-4.) Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory differs from much of the recent literature on Civil War and Reconstruction-era religion in two essential ways. First, the partiality so often evident in denominational histories is nowhere to be found in this book's more than two hundred pages of text (divided into six hybrid chronological and thematic chapters). Author Christopher C. Moore believes that J. William Jones's Baptistism was the determinative force in Jones's career as a formulator and then propagator of the Lost Cause myth. Accordingly, this book is a selfevidently "Baptist" history. But while Moore stresses that Jones's denominational identity was as the heart of his every concern, Moore does not commemorate that tradition. Moore's ability to thus steer clear of qualitative considerations of Baptist doctrine, while simultaneously using it as an analytical lens, is memorable in both its sophistication and its restraint. Second, the author treats faith itself as an agent of causation. The idea that Jones's Lost Cause rationalizations were part and parcel of his religiosity is not groundbreaking. What Moore does in Apostle of the Lost Cause that is essentially innovative, however, is to consider how Jones's Baptist beliefs shaped his politics rather than how his politics informed his beliefs. In other words, rather than hypothesize about how Jones compromised his truest religious convictions to accommodate a "merciful" defense of the Confederacy and an explanation for its defeat, Moore shows how being a Baptist shaped Jones's convictions in the original. No matter, then, if it was Jones protecting the image of Robert E. Lee, or explaining away the shortcomings of the Confederate prison system, or, finally, imagining Confederate defeat as part of God's plan to imbue the American character with morality and virtue, Moore convincingly situates such memory-shaping campaigns within "a nineteenthcentury Baptist context" and then, by extrapolation, reveals how Jones's "deep-seated denominational identity fashioned Confederate memory" (p. 4). This demonstration—how to centralize religion as a historical cause rather than an effect—is the book's most important methodological contribution. All of these plaudits notwithstanding, there is a shortcoming in Moore's otherwise masterful volume. The author's consideration of the prewar Jones is frustratingly brief. Moore offers that "little is known of Jones's childhood years" beyond the general features of his education and the dates of a few milestone events in his religious development (p. 10). Nevertheless, in the name of context and as precursor for the apologist that Jones became, one wonders if Moore might have done more to explore the societal influences of what is known about the young Jones. Jones's father, Francis, presided over a slaveowning family, but the family held six enslaved people in total. Francis Jones was a magistrate of Louisa County, Virginia, yet his son, William, arrived at the University of Virginia "'an uncouth country boy,'" as one of his professors there put it, unprepared for college life (p. 10). Stated plainly, there must be real elucidatory value hiding somewhere in the knowledge that the young Virginian [End Page 730] was of an "almost elite" family, was reared in an environment of aspirational deference to the planter elite, and, yes, was baptized into a slavery-legitimating Baptist tradition. Even if that part of Jones's story remains a mystery, however, Moore deserves accolades for the light he has shone on the later life and career of this true Apostle of the Lost Cause. Timothy Wesley Austin Peay State University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association
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Aug 17, 2023
Open Access
Terri A Clark 