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

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.