God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind

God and General Longstreet is a study of the Lost Cause mentality, its origins, its icons and how religion was central to many aspects of the Lost Cause Movement. The book's primary theme is really a fairly good explanation of how Robert E. Lee was deified and cast as the "principle standard bearer" of the Confederacy. Also how he was made out to be the perfect Christian warrior to fit the mythology. The book's title is somewhat misleading though. A 150 page book, there are a scant 10 pages that mentions Longstreet. These 10 pages do basically explain how some in the South created lies about Longstreet's war record, and why they hated him for becoming a Republican, but this section is not at all in proportion to the rest of the book enough that warrants his name in the title of the book. It is not an in-depth explanation of the casting of how and where Longstreet was spun into the Lost Cause legends. One of the most interesting sections is about R. E. Lee's own writings about his feelings as a career soldier before the Civil War. The author's bring up his ironically unsure self-image as a career soldier to contrast what the Lost Cause movement made him out to be. This work points out that during his US Army career, Lee felt it would destine him to a restless life separated from his roots. Lee described Army life as an existence that "debars all hope of domestic enjoyment," and he viewed family separation as "a just punishment for my sins." The books better sections bring out some fascinating and little known research on Lee.

I've long been a student of the Civil War Era and the Lost Cause is one of the facets of the Civil War that I have long been interested in. This is a short book by Connelly (one of my favorite CW historians, by the way) and Bellows, but it is still one of the better ones on the Lost Cause. This work is more about the Southern mind and how Southern writers built up the Lost Cause and how it has evolved up until this book was originally published in the early 1980s. It also gives an excellent look at how Robert E. Lee became the symbol of the South, which Connelly wrote an entire book about as well. What emerges is the Lost Cause evolved from petty in-fighting about who was to blame for Confederate defeat (hence the Longstreet part of the title) to the creation of an image of the South that was both romantic and tragic. Connelly and Bellows argue that by World War I, the entire nation embraced this image and the dual image of the South has remained. This is a very interesting book and one that should be read by all students of the South, not just people interested in the Civil War. I give it 4 stars instead of 5, however, because there are not endnotes or footnotes so we have no idea where the authors are getting their source material, a big no-no for two academic historians. Besides that, though, no real complaints about this work.

A most enjoyable short book in which the authors, in a set of well-orchestrated essays, ponder on the development and meaning of the idea of the "Lost Cause". Soon after Appomattox, the phrase became a by-word for the perpetuation of the Confederate ideal, which itself was based on an (imperfect) analogy with the lost cause that was medieval Scotland's struggle for independence as related in Sir Walter Scott's novels. (Earnest southern writers attempted to prove that Robert E. Lee was a descendent of Robert the Bruce). From 1865 through the present days, the Lost Cause has had a variety of meanings. Those men who were involved in Confederate military and political circles attempted to justify secession, and to find reasons for the ultimate military catastrophe. Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, among others, wrote lengthy and turgid volumes essentially stating that the South went to war to protect its "rights". The fact that underlying these rights was the demand of the slave states to extend their "peculiar institution" i.e., slavery, into new territories, if not into free states, was of course, downplayed. Slavery, they said, had nothing to do with the matter. The military men, when not whining about the North's numerical and material advantages, looked for scapegoats within their own ranks. The most maligned of these was James Longstreet, who was Lee's "right arm" and "old war horse". Had it not been for his "disobedience to Lee's orders" at Gettysburg--to attack at sunrise on the 2nd of July, the battle would have been won and the Confederate cause gained. William Nelson Pendleton, the ineffective and inefficient overseer of the artillery of the Army of Northern Virginia, was the source of this accusation. Although members of Lee's staff, themselves later Lost Cause writers, denied that such an order was ever given, Pendleton's canard was taken up and spread widely by Jubal Early and others. Even now Longstreet's "slowness" at Gettysburg is believed by many Civil War buffs and some historians to be the reason the South lost the war. Lee's defeat at Gettysburg threatened the Lost Cause myth of Lee the incomparable and invincible which was one of the cornerstones of the Lost Cause. So a scapegoat was found. It need not have been Longstreet; indeed there was glory enough for all beginning with Heth's rash opening of hostilities without benefit of reconnaissance, Ewell's failure hours later to seize Culp's Hill, and, of course J.E.B. Stuart's failure to do his job, perhaps a fatal failure to Confederate success. But Longstreet, after the war, "committed three cardinal sins". He joined the Republicans during Reconstruction and advised southerners to accept the existing political situation.. Second, Pendleton's canard stuck like flypaper, thanks to the vigorous pamphleteering of Jubal Early. And finally, Longstreet, when interviewed by a historian of the Army of the Potomac, admitted that he

If you want to know how the Lost Cause syndrome got its start and how Longstreet to his shock became the designated failure of the Confederacy, this is a revealing book. Old Pete survived his crippling wounds incurred by bullets during his great counter attack in the Wilderness but the ink from "Old Jube's" (Jubal Early's) pen created greater harm and anguish to Longstreet as Early effectively destroys his reputation. Early holds a tight grasp of southern history and the Southern Historical Society making sure that no one dared write anything about the War of the Rebellion without his approval. How ironic that the man that moved Alexander's auxiliary guns away during Pickett's charge, the former and inefficient Pendleton, makes up a bogus story about Longstreet disobeying a sunrise attack order on the second day of Gettysburg in a speech shortly after Lee died and blames Longstreet solely for the lost battle and in turn the "cause". Early picks up the ridiculous story to exaggerate Pendleton's story to gross proportions while coloring his own role that is very suspect in not supporting an attack on Culp's Hill on the first day of Gettysburg and he also pushed Ewell in not moving his corps to the right as Lee wished failing to contract Lee's over extended lines. Old Jube was a tough fighter but had a hard time with cavalry particularly in the Valley where Lee finally has Early relieved. Unlike Longstreet and Lee, Early left the country after the war and upon his return made a career out of rewriting history to suit his slant. Jubal Early could have been the Roy Cohn of the post Civil War era. Connelly also explains how Lee becomes a greater hero after death and a rallying point for statues and dedications while the south understandably searches for an answer to the defeat of what many in the south tried to remember as a noble cause. Jackson's role is diminished as Lee's appreciative role becomes magnified almost to diety. As the reasons for the "Lost Cause" become justified, Davis and Stephens even write retrospective histories that contrast conveniently with the changing times, States Rights and Rights under the Constitution rise to greater reasons of separation than does slavery for example.A devastating loss with so much death, maiming of young men and destruction needed a nobleness that was overwhelmed only by large numbers of Union soldiers and errors of judgement of those other thsn the leaders of the armies. "Lest we Forget" is defined in Connelly's fascinating book.

Connelly and Bellows offer a fine selection of short essays that deal with the "mentality" of the Southern mind amid the squalor of a defeated nation. I would think those more versed in their Civil War studies would appreciate this more than the casual reader. An appetizing psychological look at the only section of our country that has been a "defeated nation"