The American Spectator

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(Page 3 of 3)

To prove it, Southerners took up pens as they had once taken up arms and fought the war all over again on paper. The literature that Louis J. Wigfall had insisted the South did not need was needed now, and the revisionists answered this new call to the colors, turning out so many fervent histories, biographies, and memoirs that an anonymous wag gave them the collective title, "An Unbiased Account of the War Between the States from the Southern Point of View."

By the end of the 19th century, abetted by the well-oiled publicity machines of ancestor societies such as United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans, the revisionists had convinced not only the South but much of the rest of America as well to see the Confederacy as the apotheosis of romance and to accept as revealed truth the mystique of the Lost Cause.

Students of the Civil War will like this book, but students of human nature will love it.

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