The Journal of the Civil War Era

Adam H. Domby’s The False Cause is a welcome addition to a flurry of state-level studies of the Lost Cause, joining recent books on Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and South Carolina. It is no coincidence that the border states and Upper South are especially well represented in this set, joining geographically broader works on Civil War remembrance in Appalachia and the western guerrilla theater. If the books about South Carolina analyze the original core of the Confederacy, most of the scholarship has explored the development of the Lost Cause on the peripheries of secession. Domby is alert to the potential of North Carolina to demonstrate the postwar production of political unity in the white South. Although he begins and ends with the monument dedications, veterans’ reunions, and other commemorations that have been staples of the literature, the heart of his monograph is an investigation of Confederate pension processing in [End Page 442] North Carolina, focused particularly on Piedmont counties. Domby aims to combine his rhetorical and administrative histories in a meditation on the Lost Cause culture of dishonesty, a timely theme.

Domby’s fundamental premise is that in North Carolina “white supremacist politicians ‘needed’ the Lost Cause perhaps more than in any other state” (4). He reports that North Carolina had more conscripts, more draft exemptions, and more deserters than any other Confederate state, and he highlights the relative strength of postwar biracial politics before the Wilmington massacre of 1898. He devotes less attention to labor unrest in a center of New South industrialization but organizes much of the first half of the book around tobacco and textile magnate Julian S. Carr. A conscript private who came to wear a Confederate general’s uniform because of his rank in the United Confederate Veterans, Carr offers a rewarding focus for Domby’s emphasis on Lost Cause fabrication. The book dissects Carr’s verifiable historical claims, especially his inflation of the number of University of North Carolina students who volunteered for and served in the Confederate army, and his ideological positions. Domby points out that Carr’s business and philanthropic interests gave him a reputation as a racial moderate. This proved to be a liability in campaigns for public office against more belligerent white supremacists, which Carr sought to repair on the hustings. His dispensation of patronage also led him to address Black audiences and attempt to impose his version of history upon them. As Domby writes in an account of a speech at Biddle University (now Johnson C. Smith University), “In telling an obvious lie that no one could publicly contradict, Carr expressed his power” (39–40).

The second half of the book is a remarkable audit of Confederate pension records in North Carolina. Domby shows that many deserters received benefits because “no one really wanted to find fraud” and that the award of limited payments to African Americans supported the white ideal of the “faithful slave” (88). This research is an exemplary collation of pension, military, census, and genealogical sources. Domby combines his survey of broad patterns with a keen eye for dramatic individual stories. For example, his discussion of African Americans who were granted pensions for services to the Confederacy culminates with this revelation about the death record of the last recipient: his father was the soldier listed on his pension application as his master. The point draws on assiduous archival digging and clear understanding of the narratives promoted and hidden by the Lost Cause. In general, the scholarship on Civil War remembrance might better connect its cultural and social dimensions. Domby’s book is a good effort in this direction, but it never fully situates North Carolina benefits administration within the vein of scholarship initiated by Theda [End Page 443] Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1992). The argument that the pension system fostered white supremacism and harmony at a...