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The reader's biggest question after putting the book down (whether he or she puts it down after page 150, or after page 250, or at the very end) will be: Just how homogeneous was this mainstream middle? Is "coalesce" really the right verb to describe how this mainstream developed? A fuller description of the end result might have strengthened Richardson's claims about the mainstream's character and about the usefulness of the concept in the first place. Or, maybe it would have revealed such heterogeneity in the "mainstream" as to cast doubt. Perhaps the mainstream middle was really a "loose baggy monster," to borrow Henry James's description of big sprawling novels.

Hollywood responded with productions that embraced to varying degrees the Civil War generation's four major interpretive traditions—each of which can be sketched quickly. Ex-Confederates who established the Lost Cause tradition portrayed an admirable struggle against hopeless odds, denied the importance of slavery in bringing secession and war, and ascribed to themselves constitutional high-mindedness and gallantry on the battlefield. The Union Cause tradition, which predominated among white northerners, portrayed the war as an effort to maintain a viable republic in the face of secessionist actions that threatened both the work of the Founders and, by extension, the future of democracy in a world that had yet to embrace the concept of self-rule. The Emancipation Cause tradition, preeminently the work of African Americans but also embraced by some white northerners, interpreted the war as a struggle to liberate four million slaves and remove a cancerous influence on American society and politics. Finally, the Reconciliation Cause tradition represented an attempt by white people North and South to extol American virtues that both sides manifested during the war, exalt the restored nation that emerged from the conflict, and mute the role of African Americans.

The argument of the Lost Cause insists that the South fought nobly and against all odds not to preserve slavery but entirely
for other reasons, such as the rights of states to govern themselves, and that southerners were forced to defend themselves
against Northern aggression. When the idea of a Southern nation was defeated on the battlefield, the vision of a separate
Southern people, with a distinct and noble cultural character, remained.