Books in Brief: God and General Longstreet

God and General Longstreet, by Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows (Louisiana State University Press, 158 pp., $12.95). Mr. Connelly is the author of the acclaimed iconoclastic biography of Robert E. Lee, The Marble Man (1977), and here he and Barbara Bellows, a research fellow at the University of South Carolina, where Connelly is a history professor, set forth what may be the first comprehensive view of “The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind,” as their book is subtitled. Mr. Connelly is one of the betterwriting historians today, and this slim volume will reinforce his reputation among Civil War specialists, historians, and those interested in popular culture. He and Miss Bellows here root around in the accumulated muck of over a century of Southern writing about the Civil War, and conclude: “The memory of the war—not the conflict itself—has always been the focus of the Lost Cause mentality. This is, in effect, the meaning of the phrase itself. The Lost Cause has never been a celebration of the Confederacy, but a monument to defeat.” This book examines in detail how the various veterans, journalists, and memoirists came to grips with their absolute national defeat. One of the ways they did this was to deify the warrior Lee at the expense of all other Confederate generals, but primarily James Longstreet—the scapegoat of Gettysburg (he takes up little of the book, despite the title). In “How Virginia Won the Civil War,” Mr. Connelly and Miss Bellows show how the writers who elevated Lee did the same with the Old Dominion, making the state at once the architect of the Union and the Lion of the Confederacy. And they show how the righteousness and self-justification of the early postwar school of Lost Cause writing turned into more nationally acceptable work describing the romance and tragedy of Lee and the Confederate States of America. Such work, the authors note, sought to explain Dixie to the nation, thus aiding in reunification. That much of the Lost Cause work was mawkish slop cannot be denied, and the authors don’t. Those who would know the Lost Cause and what it meant and still means would do well to read God and General Longstreet. joe mysak