In this examination of the experience and evolution of memory, celebration, and symbols in the South Carolina upcountry, Poole explains how the 'Lost Cause' became transformed from 'a living ideology of defiance' to 'a dead past to be honored.' He provides fresh insights and understanding of the roots of southern conservatism and the central role of Pitchfork Ben Tillman in making racial violence a central element in his state's transition to modernity.

—Orville Vernon Burton, University of Illinois

An important study of the changes in political perspective that took place among white men in upper South Carolina after the Civil War . . . An important study of a southern state in the last third of the nineteenth century.

—Civil War Book Review

The virtues of Poole's work are many . . . this is a good book and, what is more, it is a significant and original contribution. It brings a new and welcome intellectual rigor to the study of the meaning, and the political, social, and cultural consequences, of Confederate memory.

—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

Never Surrender greatly enriches our understanding of the conservative tradition in the postwar South, while challenging many former assumptions. . . . This excellent book will appeal mostly to specialists in this period of southern history, many of whom will find its arguments compelling.

—Public Historian

Poole has given us a detailed and careful account of Reconstruction and its aftermath in South Carolina. . . . Americans today have witnessed the rise of the NAACP and black political power. In South Carolina, the NAACP has recently been victorious in arguing against the displaying of the Confederate battle flag, at least on publicly supported premises. Poole’s book provides a context for such contemporary South Carolina controversies.

—American Historical Review

Poole has uncovered a niche in the vast region of the American South that offers explanation and depth to previous studies of the Lost Cause. Perhaps most significantly, he has demonstrated a way for scholars to mediate between the two dominant interpretations proposed by Wilson and Foster.

—Journal of Southern Religion

Poole's book represents part of a new wave of scholarship on the Lost Cause that builds on but challenges the conclusions Gaines M. Foster and Charles Reagan Wilson drew in the 1980s. Yet, while Poole has new and significant things to say about the Lost Cause, his deeper purpose is to unravel the ideas of southern conservatism.

—Florida Historical Quarterly