Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause 1865-1920

About this book

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."