Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity by blending Christian rhetoric and symbols with the rhetoric and imagery of Confederate tradition. Out of defeat emerged a civil religion that embodied the Lost Cause. As Charles Reagan Wilson writes in his new preface, 'The Lost Cause version of the regional civil religion was a powerful expression, and recent scholarship affirms its continuing power in the minds of many white southerners.’
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CHARLES REAGAN WILSON is director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and a professor of history at the University of Mississippi. He is coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and author of Baptized in Blood (Georgia).