Lost Causes

“In taking up the provocative challenge of understanding Confederate veterans as they understood themselves, Bradley R. Clampitt explores the many-layered experiences that battle-hardened soldiers confronted as they transitioned to lives as private citizens. Lost Causes is as much about history as it is the historical process itself. Clampitt demonstrates how to balance personal accounts written during the turbulent events of 1865 alongside carefully crafted postwar reminiscences. At once a study of the ideology of defeat, the personal and institutional processes of demobilization, the complexities of white southern masculinity, and the origins of the Lost Cause, Clampitt’s new book contributes a novel addition to the vast literature on the ways that former Confederates dealt with profound loss and reconstructed their world.”

~Andrew F. Lang, associate professor of history at Mississippi State University and author of In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America

“Popular accounts hold that bedraggled rebels returned to their homes in tatters, exhausted by the demands of war and devastated by the reality of defeat. Informed by deep and careful research in a trove of original sources, historian Bradley Clampitt usefully complicates this stubbornly enduring image, offering readers the richest, most stimulating analysis to date of Confederate demobilization. From the actual logistics of the journey home to the much-awaited homecoming moment, Clampitt supplies genuinely new insights into the minds and emotions of defeated rebels. Scholars and popular readers alike will welcome this lucid and perceptive account to a long-overdue but growing body of literature on Confederate veterans.”

~Brian Matthew Jordan, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War and coeditor of The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans

“While Lost Causes stands alone and will prove deeply informative to readers, it is in conversation with a host of recent studies on the war’s end and veterans’ experiences. Clampitt has written a commendable book that reveals how Confederate veterans from across the South responded to defeat, surrender, and readjustment. The layered experiences he artfully illuminates expose a critical period of personal transformation as the nation lurched toward a tumultuous reconstruction.” ~Journal of Southern History

“Clampitt maps some of the 1,100 Confederate soldier testimonies that form his research, noting that some four hundred of the soldiers wrote diaries, letters, memoirs, and regimental histories, while another seven hundred offered responses within places such as the Tennessee Civil War Veterans’ Questionnaires. Much of the texture and day-to-day experiences Clampitt brings to life builds from these materials.” ~Journal of American History