The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, And White Supremacy In Confederate Memory, by Adam H. Domby

This is the sort of book that does not really move the needle when it comes to debate, not least because the author has such a strident and such an activist viewpoint that what he says will be disregarded by the sort of people that would need to be convinced of the rightness of his position simply because of his activism and his celebration of various activists. For another, this book suffers some numerous shortcomings that prevent the book from being as powerful as it could have been. As is often the case in this sort of book, the title provided is very general in dealing with the Lost Cause as being subject to high degrees of fabrication, which was certainly true when it comes to the roughly 20% of pension claims for veterans and loyal slaves on a state level that appear to have been at least somewhat fraudulent and that contributed to the bolstering of Confederate claims about the loyalty of slaves to their masters (even if it was necessary for survival in antebellum and the postwar South in many cases) as well as the supposed unity of Southern whites in defense of the Confederacy, which ended up destroying the historical memory of resistance among many Southern whites during the Civil War, especially in North Carolina, to the Confederacy. A larger weakness is that the author’s discussion about memory and its falsifiability and fraudulent nature applies just as certainly to the author’s progressive fellow travelers as it does to the Neo-confederates the author views with such disdain.

This book is a short book at between 150 and 200 pages but it is by no means succinct. In between an introduction and epilogue that show the author’s activism and some false modesty about the author’s own place in the debate over Confederate monuments, the book consists of five chapters that focus on the complicated place of memory within North Carolina concerning its place in the Civil War and the place of its people in memories about the Civil War. The author begins with his strongest point, and that is his discussion of the context of the building of Confederate monuments and their explicitly anti-Reconstruction attitude (1). This is followed by the fraudulent creation of heroes of North Carolina’s Civil War experience because of the somewhat embarrassing performance of that state in the Civil War (2). Two chapters on pension fraud follow, one of which focuses on pension fraud involving Confederate soldiers, which included deserters and people too young to actually fight (3), and the other involves loyal ex-slaves who sought pensions to survive in their old age by showing loyalty to the white Southerners who ran North Carolina in the time after 1900 (4). After this there is a further chapter on the creation of black Confederates to suit contemporary Lost Cause narratives (5). The book ends with acknowledgements, notes, a selected bibliography, and an index.

How is one to deal with a book like this one? As someone who has very little personal interest in North Carolina as opposed to the South as a whole, I found that this book suffered more than a bit from tunnel vision in terms of the author’s focus on North Carolina. This makes some sense given that the data in North Carolina concerning pension fraud and the debate over North Carolina’s troubled political history, its poor performance in the Civil War as a reluctant participant in the rebellion, and on Confederate monuments in North Carolina and specifically the speeches given at the unveiling of the Silent Sam statue on the University of North Carolina campus are of particular interest to the author. Nevertheless, it is difficult to make valid judgments on such a small sample of data when there are ten other Confederate states that rebelled, and at least one other state (Kentucky) that acted in the postwar period as if it had been a member of the Confederacy after slavery was abolished except as a punishment for crime by the Thirteenth Amendment. Now that would be an interesting story to read, if someone would undertake it. As it is, this story is too provincial to be universal, and not of general enough interest or with enough data to make broad and sweeping judgments about the entire Lost Cause mythology. Even as someone who has no personal sympathy for the cause of the Confederacy, these are serious problems.