The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won

Historian and legal philosopher Edward H. Bonekemper III puts paid to the Romantic notion that the South was an essentially benign, declining empire and always doomed to lose the Civil War. He argues that Robert E. Lee made terrible mistakes-chief among them continuing to allow James Longstreet a command-that the South could have prevailed with a better economic strategy, and that Ulysses S. Grant was no butcher, but the Union’s great solution to the problem of Southern revolt.

The former Confederate states have continually mythologized the South’s defeat to the North, depicting the Civil War as unnecessary, or as a fight over states’ Constitutional rights, or as a David v. Goliath struggle in which the North waged total war over an underdog South. In The Myth of the Lost Cause, historian Edward Bonekemper deconstructs this multi-faceted myth, revealing the truth about the war that nearly tore the nation apart 150 years ago.