Lost Causes: Confederate Demobilization and the Making of Veteran Identity by Bradley R. Clampitt (review)

Abstract

In his Lost Causes: Confederate Demobilization and the Making of Veteran Identity, Bradley R. Clampitt tackles two myths about the post-Civil War South. First, he corrects the Lost Cause narrative concerning Confederate demobilization during the summer of 1865. That myth stressed that thousands of “penniless and starving” Confederate soldiers were forced by their haughty and vindictive conquerors to walk hundreds of miles home, helped only by “proud southern civilians” (p. 2). But Clampitt shows that the situation was much more complex. Second, the book contradicts scholars who claim that the Lost Cause surfaced fifteen years after the war as part of a broader movement of commemoration following Reconstruction. Clampitt instead contends that the Lost Cause was the immediate coping mechanism created by Confederate veterans in 1865. To set the record straight, he examined some 1,100 first-hand accounts, a mix of wartime letters and diaries, postwar memoirs, and other reports. Based on his evidence, he argues that while “the war itself solidified the common principles of Confederate soldiers and rendered them perpetual Rebels,” the experiences of “defeat and demobilization reinforced that identity and hardened the recalcitrant, unapologetic attitudes of southern veterans” (p. 14). In the first section of the book, Clampitt details both systems put into place by Union and Confederate leadership to facilitate demobilization and the subsequent failures of those plans. Upon Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Clampitt notes, the Union Army worked to distribute parole papers to Confederate veterans, which would allow them to draw rations from the army while travelling home. Neither side wished for chaos or prolonged demobilization. Where available, the Union facilitated river and railroad transportation for returning soldiers and even gave mules to some. But several factors complicated these plans. The main Confederate armies, for example,