One in every eight public statues in the United States celebrates a Confederate soldier. Despite the recent spate of monument removal, hundreds of shrines remain to patrician slaver-secessionists, including Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. If representation in bronze and marble serves as a measuring stick, the Confederacy is, certainly in relative terms, the most commemorated group or cause in the nation’s history.

However, one Confederate general — James Longstreet — is conspicuously absent from this collection of Great Man statuary. Historian Elizabeth Varon’s new book, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South, argues that the motivation behind this omission is simple. By supporting black civil rights during Reconstruction, Longstreet, one of the Confederacy’s most important and celebrated wartime military leaders, became an apostate to white supremacists in the South.

Through Longstreet, Varon skillfully demonstrates the complexities of the Reconstruction era and illuminates the role of the Lost Cause in obliterating southern dissenters from the war’s popular memory.