Author Description

This is the first full-length biography of Sumner Archibald Cunningham (1843-1913), a central figure of the Lost Cause movement in the post-Civil War South. The focus of John A. Simpson's study is on Cunningham's career as founder, owner, and editor of one of the New South's most influential magazines, the Nashville-based Confederate Veteran. Reared on a prosperous farm in middle Tennessee, Cunningham signed on in 1861 at age eighteen, as a private in the 41st Tennessee Infantry. He fought in several battles, was captured, and escaped to fight again. By the end of his enlistment, he had risen to the rank of sergeant-major. Like so many of his peers, Cunningham's pivotal life experience was his Confederate service. The collective trauma of war and defeat, combined with what Cunningham assessed as a personally "inglorious" military record, drove his obsessive involvement in helping to form and then defend the most historically palatable image possible of the Southern cause. In 1871, after several moderately successful years as a mercantilist in his hometown of Shelbyville, Tennessee, Cunningham purchased a local newspaper and began his forty-two-year career in journalism. Using his position of high visibility to help raise funds for a monument to Jefferson Davis, Cunningham soon became the fund's general agent. From there he rose to the forefront of the movement to sanctify Confederate veteranhood. At his death in 1913, Cunningham was eulogized across the South for his zealous dedication to the Confederate heritage. His story, which enriches our understanding of the ongoing cultural phenomenon of the Lost Cause, also depicts one man's personal struggle to rationalize his wartime inadequacies during an era of intense mythologizing.