BookBrowse Reviews White Lies by Ann Bausum

BookBrowse:

An expert corrective to false depictions of American history for a young adult audience that is sure to end up on banned book lists.

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What caused the Civil War? Nearly since Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865, Americans have said it was a complex conflict relating to states' rights versus the decrees of the federal government. But as Ann Bausum's White Lies: How the South Lost the Civil War, Then Rewrote the History shows, this is just one of the many lies that make up the Lost Cause—a fraudulent yet commonly accepted narrative of American history.

Drawing upon extensive research and written with unflinching honesty for a young adult audience, this book is an extremely valuable corrective to the falsifications surrounding the Civil War and the damaging legacy of those lies in the centuries that followed. Bausum begins with the period just before the outbreak of the Civil War and then walks readers through a brief history of the war itself. She bluntly emphasizes that it was fought over one thing: the southern states' desire to prolong the enslavement of Black people. She cites the speeches and writing of Confederate leaders that clearly stated this as a founding principle of the Confederacy, such as its future Vice President Alexander H. Stephens' "Cornerstone Speech" of 1861.

Bausum also explains how White leaders of the Confederacy profited from slavery, including Robert E. Lee, who would later be made into a secular saint by Americans even outside the South. Far from a paragon of nobility, Lee was a violent enslaver who sided with the Confederacy because doing so maintained his wealth and property, which included land and enslaved people. Bausum uses Lee's own writing to demonstrate this.

After a brisk recap of the war, Bausum shows how lies began to spread immediately after it ended, such as the contention that it was fought over states' rights and that Confederates were actually defending the Constitution, not rebelling against the Republic. These falsehoods were first written and published by former Confederates, then by southerners and northerners alike who didn't want to extend equal rights to Black people.

She goes on to explain how Reconstruction was derailed by southern politicians and the Compromise of 1877. This was the outcome of the contested presidential election of 1876, where Congress had to decide who won and they determined it was the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes. Southerners threatened to delay certification until Republicans agreed to remove federal troops from the former Confederacy in exchange for granting Hayes the presidency. It was at this time that southern states instituted the Jim Crow system of disenfranchisement, violence, and segregation that persisted into the mid-20th century, while many northerners looked the other way.

Throughout this narrative, Bausum calls out the specific lies underpinning the Lost Cause, including those named above but also the notion that slavery was a benevolent institution, that Reconstruction was a failure, and many more. These are presented on separate, distinct pages, which makes them impactful for readers. She applies the same treatment to the monuments to Confederate leaders and the antebellum South that were built throughout the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The weaving in of these callouts and images of the monuments breaks up and punctuates the text, making it more user-friendly for young readers.

Bausum further examines how the monuments came to be, which was largely through the efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). This women's organization propagated Lost Cause mythology for decades (and technically still exists). Most teenage readers will not be aware of the organization as the source of all those statues that were removed following racial justice protests in 2020. Bausum explains how the UDC influenced textbooks that taught Lost Cause lies to generations of schoolchildren, and how professional historians also bought into these misperceptions.

Hollywood got in on the act too, with blatantly racist box office hits like The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939). Bausum expertly ties these threads together to show how they all worked as a system: voter suppression, lynching and other violence, miseducation, Hollywood and TV, and monuments to the Confederacy.

She also includes the minority of voices who actively pushed back on these lies, notably Black activists like W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter (see Beyond the Book), but also White writers and politicians opposed to the Jim Crow system. She connects Lost Cause lies to contemporary events that young adult readers will remember, such as the massacre of Black parishioners in Charleston in 2015 and the Unite the Right rally in 2017 in Charlottesville. The widespread removal of Confederate monuments following the death of George Floyd in 2020 is covered as well, as is the virulent backlash against their removal that continues today.

At times, the focus on monuments and statues seems to dominate the narrative, but since these are the most tangible examples of Lost Cause ideology that students would be familiar with, it's understandable. The author's language can be a little dense, as in describing a monument that "summarizes the sentiments that supported a war of rebellion and presents them as worthy of commemoration and celebration, in perpetuity." In the classroom, White Lies is therefore best suited to AP US History and college courses. This doesn't diminish the book's usefulness—it simply means educators should be thoughtful when incorporating it into their syllabi.

There will also likely be an uphill battle for teachers hoping to add the book to their curriculum, because it plainly states all the things that have become prohibited as "wokeness" in public discourse today, and such books are often targeted with banning. For this very reason, White Lies is extremely valuable for young audiences—the necessary response to the lies of the Lost Cause that they need to see.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in August 2025, and has been updated for the December 2025 edition. Click here to go to this issue.