San Antonio College Library

At the end of the Civil War, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman was surprisingly more popular in the newly defeated South than he was in the North. Yet only thirty years later, his name was synonymous with evil and destruction in the South. Here, historian Wesley Moody examines these perplexing contradictions and how they and others function in past and present myths about Sherman. Demon of the Lost Cause reveals the machinations behind the Sherman...

"In Thomas Dixon's novel that became the film The Birth of a Nation, the scalawag - a white southerner who supported Congressional Reconstruction and the Republican Party - is summarized as a "Judas Iscariot who sold his people for thirty pieces of silver, which he got for licking the feet of his conqueror and fawning on his Negro allies." Departures from this stereotypical view have appeared slowly since the 1940s as important revisionist historians...