God and General Longstreet

Download or read book God and General Longstreet written by Thomas Lawrence Connelly and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1995-03-01 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 centurylong 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.