The False Cause

Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory

By: Adam H. Domby

Narrated by: Jack de Golia

A fascinating, original, and highly enjoyable book that makes a meaningful contribution to understanding the Lost Cause and Civil War memory.

The Lost Cause ideology that emerged after the Civil War and flourished in the early 20th century in essence sought to recast a struggle to perpetuate slavery as a heroic defense of the South. As Adam Domby reveals here, this was not only an insidious goal, but it was founded on falsehoods.

The False Cause focuses on North Carolina to examine the role of lies and exaggeration in the creation of the Lost Cause narrative. In the process the book shows how these lies have long obscured the past and have been used to buttress white supremacy in ways that resonate to this day.

Domby explores how fabricated narratives about the war’s cause, Reconstruction, and slavery—as expounded at monument dedications and political rallies—were crucial to Jim Crow. He questions the persistent myth of the Confederate army as one of history’s greatest, revealing a convenient disregard of deserters, dissent, and Unionism, and exposes how pension fraud facilitated a myth of unwavering support of the Confederacy among nearly all White Southerners.

Domby shows how the dubious concept of “Black Confederates” was spun from a small number of elderly and indigent African American North Carolinians who got pensions by presenting themselves as “loyal slaves”.

The book concludes with a penetrating examination of how the Lost Cause narrative and the lies on which it is based continue to haunt the country today and still work to maintain racial inequality.

©2020 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia on behalf of University of Virginia Press (P)2022 by Blackstone Publishing

Great! Need confirmation bias? Look elsewhere.

Well researched! Well told. If you are looking justification for tearing down statures some of that is here but not for the reasons you are thinking. If you are reading this for opposition research so you can improve your defense of State Rights, Economics, and/or how the Civil War was about everything but slavery, good luck with that; the more you listen, the more you'll abandon that nonesense.

I loved Domby's analysis and justification for how sometimes lies and liars absolutely need to be named as such. He similarly evaluates desertion with factual precision not to embarrass southern pride or union drafts but to compare and contracts lies about bravery.

The only thing I found vaguely disappointing is how Domby stayed in his lane. He focuses on North Carolina stories because that's where he teaches, rather than cherry-picking the most extreme examples to make his points from all the rebellious (aka independence seeking) states.

I would nevertheless like to read/listen to the same expert analysis applied across all blue and grey states. Specifically more about why the northern states thought they were fighting the Civil War would be interesting. From other reads it seems like that answer was nuanced and not always about slavery. I'd like to hear/read Domby add that aspect to his analysis. To me at least, It seems like we can't move forward as a nation on race issues until it's more widely agreed slavery was at the heart of the matter.