Lost Causes: Confederate Demobilization and the Making of Veteran Identity by Bradley R. Clampitt (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Lost Causes: Confederate Demobilization and the Making of Veteran Identity by Bradley R. Clampitt
• Barbara A. Gannon (bio)

Lost Causes: Confederate Demobilization and the Making of Veteran Identity. Bradley R. Clampitt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-0-8071-7716-7. 344 pp., cloth, $50.00.

Lately, historians and others have devoted their attention to veterans’ home-coming. It is not surprising, given that a generation of veterans recently returned home from the seemingly forever wars of the twenty-first century. Moreover, Americans who remember the Vietnam War lament the failure to welcome back its veterans and understand that regardless of causes lost or won their communities owe these men and women proper homecomings. Bradley R. Clampitt’s Lost Causes: Confederate Demobilization and the Making of Veteran Identity represents an outstanding contribution to this body of work. As the title suggests, Clampitt focuses on this post-Appomattox demo-bilization of the Confederate armies. Unlike the defeated nations in modern wars, the Confederate government did not surrender, but its separate armies did so in stages in the spring and early summer of 1865.

While the terms of surrender were extremely generous, particularly given President Lincoln’s assassination by Confederate sympathizers, the demobilization became just another cause for Confederate bitterness as Southerners remembered the Civil War—their Lost Cause—in the decades after the war. Clampitt describes the “traditional or popular interpretation” of the war’s end. According to the Confederates supporters “thousands of courageous [End Page 97] Confederate veterans, penniless and starving, find themselves hundreds of miles from home. Through wit, tenacity, and camaraderie, with enthusiastic assistance from proud southern civilians, . . . the soldiers scattered in all directions, typically on foot.” Despite these challenges, these men were “defeated but undaunted” embarking “upon journeys of epic proportions to reach their loved ones and experienced iconic homecoming moments with families and, in some accounts, loyal freedpeople who celebrated the return of the warriors in gray” (2).

While this myth is sometimes true, some men walked hundreds of miles home assisted by supportive civilians and experienced an interracial home-coming, overall, the myth failed to reflect reality. First and perhaps foremost, after the initial chaos Union officials provided free transportation by rail and waterways and rations to facilitate Confederate soldier’s travels; a generosity that few victorious armies have ever shown the defeated. In addition, to the Confederate erasure of this US government support, veterans and others forgot the crime wave that occurred as these men went home. Clampitt chronicles “the lawless summer of 1865,” when these men took what they needed to complete their journey. As former Confederates agreed on a collective memory of the war, they erased the crime-ridden voyage home.

While he did not label this phenomenon, the author’s nuanced analysis of the differences between the accounts of demobilization written right after the war and those that occurred later document the evolution of individuals’ memory to a group’s collective memory—the agreed-on memory of a group concerning a shared lived experience. According to Clampitt, the days, weeks, or months journeying home “reinforced existing bonds forged between Confederate soldiers in wartime and the immediate aftermath of the conflict [and] helped establish the ideological underpinnings of the Lost Cause,” the collective memory of former Confederates (2). Individuals may have remembered the crime wave, but the Lost Cause rejected the idea that honorable Confederate veterans committed crimes on their way home. While forgetting matters, the collective memory of demobilization enshrined the notion of an interracial homecoming that included the formerly enslaved. Soldiers’ homecoming recollections included African Americans’ embrace because of the loyal slaves’ centrality to the Lost Cause narrative.

While the memory of the Lost Cause matters, so does reality. Clampitt accurately describes these men who “survived the war, but only just” and experienced a “harrowing odyssey that most present-day readers could only [End Page 98] imagine” (2). Compounding this suffering, soldiers encountered “further devastation in the form of lost or suffering family members and dilapidated homesteads” (14). Clampitt argues that “Confederate veterans typically blame such misery on the overarching arm of federal authority.” As a result, these men “collectively fortified an identity forged in...