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Enduring Legacy: Rhetoric and Ritual of the Lost Cause. By W. Stuart Towns. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. Pp. xvii, 190. Introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $37.50.)
After the American Civil War, white southerners and some northerners increasingly embraced the "Lost Cause" interpretation of the Old South and its demise. Many came to remember a South in which slavery was a benign institution and had little to do with the coming of a great war. Furthermore, the Confederacy could not win that war because of the North's industrial superiority and larger population. Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson were lauded as quasi gods who fought for a good and noble cause-mainly states' rights. Additionally, Reconstruction was a terrible time in which blacks and "black" Republicans terrorized heroic ex-Confederates and their families.
W. Stuart Towns' goal "is to illustrate the role played by public speaking in determining how southerners remembered the Old South, the Confederacy, the Civil...