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Lost Cause interpretation pervades the public's memory of the Civil War. Date published: 11/16/2002
LEE AND HIS ARMY IN CONFEDERATE HISTORY, by Gary W. Gallagher. The University of North Carolina Press, 295 pages. Illustrations, maps, chapter notes, index. $29.95. GEN. ROBERT E. LEE and the Army of Northern Virginia are inseparable from the history of the Confederate States of America. If this review were somehow translated into the kind of "proof of a theorem" that we all remember from high school geometry, that statement could be accepted as "given." What Gary W. Gallagher has in mind in "Lee and His Army in Confederate History" is something a little different from a geometry proof. At bottom, Gallagher accepts the primacy of Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia as the foundations of Confederate power. Having determined that the keel of the interpretive ship is sound, he wishes to eliminate the bad wood in the hull that might allow a sea of criticism to sink an otherwise seaworthy vessel. Gallagher explains that shortly after Lee's death, the way in which the history of the Southern Confederacy was written came under the influence of Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early. Lee's "bad old man" interpreted the South's defeat in terms of a Lost Cause that deserved victory, but was overwhelmed by Federal numbers and material abundance. The Lost Cause version of Confederate history asserted by Early and others held that not slavery but the struggle for states' rights had caused secession. Secession was constitutionally correct, and President Abraham Lincoln wanted war with the South in order to ensure the passage of tariffs and other legislation favorable to Northern industry and interests. Gen. Lee and Lt. Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson were officers above approach. Most of Lee's other subordinates (except those who became Republicans after the war) were the Confederate equivalent of the knights of King Arthur's Round Table. The men of the Army of Northern Virginia had been Lee's willing instruments in the Confederate struggle to expel the Yankee hordes from the South's (especially Virginia's) sacred soil.
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