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ASD:    Well, first of all I think probably both of us—but I can certainly speak of my view of Virginia soldiers, grounds their initial motivations to go to fight in a desire to preserve a world based on racial privilege in which slavery plays the central role in structuring their society, whether it be socially, intellectually, religiously. So there’s no question that the Lost Cause view of slavery is essentially benign, if not positive. It’s absolutely wrong and doesn’t bear any relationship to the way in which these men themselves of course saw slavery as fundamental. Slavery had been a long-established right in the United States and they don’t feel as though they’re unjustified in trying to defend it. They were quite frank about that. I think even the evolving notion of family is really based on the preservation of a world which sustains those families, which for white Virginians meant a world predicated on slavery.

And this is where I think the whole notion of a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight, that both sides of that are wrong. We know that rich men actually enlist at higher rates than they represent in the population as a whole. So it’s definitely a rich man’s fight. But in many ways it’s also a poor man’s war in the sense that poor men, poor white men, have a great deal to gain from maintaining the status quo in the antebellum South. Their lives and their livelihoods are jeopardized by something that threatens that.

JP:    I think it’s a major challenge to write a book about people whose values repulse you, and I agree completely. There’s no doubt these men I study are completely dedicated to racial slavery. I find it time and again in their letters. So that part of the Lost Cause rhetoric is definitely false and that comes through in the work. But there’s a challenge as an historian to walk that line between judging these past individuals so severely that we don’t understand them. And so I tried to figure out—in the past these men were considered delusional, insane, misinformed, ignorant, whatever. And I figured, well, there are thousands of them out there that are fighting to the bitter end, there must have been reasonable people doing this. So in order to get inside their world and make sense of it, you have to suspend judgment. And it’s a fine line between suspending judgment and glorifying. There’s not doubt these men sacrificed a lot and there were heroes among them. That doesn’t make the Lost Cause rhetoric correct. I also think in terms of the Lost Cause what’s important to consider is, these were the men who created the Lost Cause, those who survived to the end.

PC:    Your diehard rebels.

JP:    Yes, these diehard rebels are the ones who are from the grassroots level writing the histories and informing society that built the Lost Cause myths and legends. It comes out of their wartime experience and their wartime beliefs, so there’s certainly a certain amount of resonance between what I call this culture of invincibility during the war and the Lost Cause myth. It’s not a coincidence; these men are propagating it in ’63 and then in 1903.

ADS:    I think you’re right, our essential job as historians is to explain and I try to do that as much as possible without judgment. It is just a historical irony that my explanation in some ways resembles the kind of argument that Lost Cause theorists have promulgated, but it seems to me—I was drawn to this topic partly because, for a long time—we certainly had a scholarship that had explored the perspectives of the elites in both sections, North and South, generals and presidents. We’ve had a long and robust literature on slavery, and on emancipation for the last twenty-five to thirty years. It’s hard to even find the right word. Yeoman plain folk, poor whites, have gone largely voiceless in the antebellum South and even through the war. And so it seems to me essential—and you can see this even in the twentieth-century literature on the American South, where we now have studies of those whites who were basically white moderates in the civil rights movement, where the picture was of massive resistance characterized every single white, and today we know—actually only in the last five years—we know that there were in fact important shades of difference within the white community. And I think this is certainly true in the Civil War experience. There are people of all shades of experience.

But another aspect of the Lost Cause that I would reject entirely, and this is, I think, one of the most pernicious, is a kind of valorization of war and a glamorization of what these men experienced, that it somehow is something that we should emulate, and I took pains in the book to take seriously those men, particularly Christian soldiers, who experienced a great deal of psychic conflict over the fact that they had to kill. People who are clearly unsettled by the clash between their values, which explicitly say, “Thou shall not kill,” and the necessity of doing that. And they’re not eager to continue it and they’re up to their elbows in blood and they’re thoroughly repulsed by it and by who they’re becoming as a result. There’s nothing glamorous about it, and I think you would be hard-pressed—until the political advantages of the Lost Cause story become clear—I’m sure that ’65-’66 most men were reluctant to think or talk about these things because it was such a ghastly experience for them.

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