Almost 130 years after Appomattox, the Civil War and the idea of the “Lost Cause” remain at the center of the southern mind. God and General Longstreet traces the persistence and the transformation of the Lost Cause from the first generation of former Confederates—who cloaked their defeat in religion and in the process elevated Robert E. Lee to postwar sainthood at the expense of General James Longstreet—to more recent times, when the Lost Cause has continued in the determined commitment of southerners to their regional culture 

Barbara L. Bellows is the author of Benevolence among Slaveholders: Caring for the Poor in Charleston, 1760-1860 and coauthor of God and General Longstreet: Essays on the Lost Cause and the Southern Mind. Formerly a professor at Middlebury College, she is a writer and a historian who divides her time between her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, and Pound Ridge, New York.

Thomas Lawrence Connelly, professor of history at the University of South Carolina for many years, was the author or coauthor of numerous books on the Civil War, including The Politics of Command: Factions and Ideas in Confederate Strategy; The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society; and God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind.