God and General Longstreet

Thomas L. Connelly was professor of history at the University of South Carolina and the author of, among other books, Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861--1862, Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862--1865, and The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society. Barbara L. Bellows is the author of Benevolence among Slaveholders: Caring for the Poor in Charleston, 1760--1860 and A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary Tradition.

More than a century after Appomattox, the Civil War and the idea of the "Lost Cause" remain at the center of the southern mind. God and General Longstreet traces the persistence and the transformation of the Lost Cause from the first generation of former Confederates to more recent times, when the Lost Cause has continued to endure in the commitment of southerners to their regional culture. Southern writers from the Confederate period through the southern renascence and into the 1970s fostered the Lost Cause, creating an image of the South that was at once romantic and tragic. By examining the work of these writers, Thomas Connelly and Barbara Bellows explain why the nation embraced this image and outline the evolution of the Lost Cause mentality from its origins in the South's surrender to its role in a century-long national expression of defeat that extended from 1865 through the Vietnam War. As Connelly and Bellows demonstrate, the Lost Cause was a realization of mortality in an American world striving for perfection, an admission of failure juxtaposed against a national faith in success.