The Confederate General Whom All the Other Confederates Hated
Illustrations by Justin Jenkins
Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.
During the summer of 1997, my wife and I picked up our 9-year-old daughter from a ballet camp in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and drove to the nearby Gettysburg National Military Park, which they had never seen and I barely remembered from a boyhood visit. The park’s presentation of history left much to be desired. The visitor center’s small museum and the numerous monuments scattered across the battlefield conveyed a great deal about how the battle had been fought in July 1863, while offering almost no explanation of why the combatants were fighting. The park commemorated the Union’s greatest military victory, but its emotional centerpiece was the disastrous southern assault known as Pickett’s Charge, identified, in the romantic glow of nostalgia, as the “high-water mark” of the Confederacy. In labels accompanying the display of historic artifacts and images, the words valor and glory were almost always applied to soldiers who fought for the South, not for the Union.
That the place where the Civil War reached its turning point had become a shrine to the courage of those who fought to destroy the nation and preserve slavery should not have been a surprise. It has long been a commonplace that the South lost the Civil War but won the battle over historical memory. For decades, almost from the moment of surrender, the ideology of the Lost Cause shaped both popular and scholarly understanding of the conflict.
As Elizabeth R. Varon observes in , her compelling new biography of James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s second in command, the Lost Cause was far more than a military narrative. It provided a comprehensive account of the war’s origins, conduct, and consequences. The conflict, in this telling, had little to do with slavery, but instead was caused, depending on which book you read, by the protective tariff, arguments over states’ rights, or white southerners’ desire for individual liberty.
