In Gaines M. Foster’s work Ghosts of the Confederacy, the author asserts that because Southerners remembered the Confederate era in ways that “trivialized” reasons for secession, the South “unquestionably” did not “achieve[] the goal of creating a true nationalism” (197; 4). With extensive discussion of the South’s celebration of the war, specifically through movements that memorialized the Southern cause and the Southern sense of honor, Foster shows how in the years following the Civil War the South experienced the rise and fall of what he terms the “Confederate celebration” that ultimately contributed to the development of a “New South” (195). This New South was defined by industrialism and commercialism, which ironically seem to be opposite the deeply imbedded interest Southerners had in an agricultural society that formed the platform that had prompted secession in 1861. If, as Foster argues, the Confederate celebration from Reconstruction through the election of the first Southern president Woodrow Wilson in 1912 was motivated by the desire for recognition and honor from the North, then few Southerners seemed bothered that their celebration and quest for respect led them down a path opposite the agricultural society they had fought so hard for in the war.
   Perhaps this is Foster’s point, that what the South chose to remember and celebrate from the Civil War were superficial remnants of the deeper issues that had originally motivated secession. In Foster’s words, “Although it served to justify the cause…the Confederate celebration did not so much sacralize the memory of the war as it sanitized and trivialized it.” (196). Thus the “ghosts” of the confederacy, the memory of those who had fought both politically and militarily for the existence of the Confederacy, were used “by various people for differing purposes” and, in Foster’s opinion, never used to adequately “define [Southern] identity” (198).
 John McCardell would disagree with Foster’s idea of a wavering Southern identity and a failed construction of Southern Nationalism during the Civil War. In his work The Idea of a Southern Nation, McCardell argues that Southern nationalism developed from sectionalism in the years leading up to the Civil War, aided by institutions such as religion, print media, and economic tensions. Thus for McCardell, the secession of the South was a critical component in the development of American nationalism, as the war and then reunification (though forced) worked to solidify certain cultural components that necessary for nationalism to exist.
   Foster contends, however, that there was no complete Southern nationalism established during the Civil War so that in the years following the war, in typical defensive mentality, the South still needed to redefine what it meant to be Southern and American. This began as a sort of obsession with remembering the dead, manifest through memorials and solemn remembrance days, that provided very much of a psychological outlet for grieving, defeated Southerners. Soon the obsession with death became more a celebration of the Southern cause, and though these causes were trivialized in remembrance, they still gave Southerners something to remember and celebrate in their quest for justification from the North. Thus while McCardell saw the formative years of Southern nationalism in the years prior to the war, Foster contends that more critical formations happened through the development of the Confederate Tradition during the second half of the 19th century.
   Both McCardell and Foster would have to agree that critical to the Southern campaign for an identity was respect from the North. Foster argues extensively that it was justification from the North that motivated so much of the South’s fervor in celebrating the Confederacy, as “Southerners gloried in northern homage” that “symbolically acknowledged the Confederates as legitimate contributors to the nation’s history” (156). For Foster, the important moment in American nationalism was the Spanish-American War, which brought Southern and Northern soldiers together for the same cause and fostered a great deal of “sectional reconciliation” (145). Later such gestures as the North honoring southern veterans with graves in national cemeteries and returning captured battle flags demonstrated the final stages of reunification necessary for a southern sense of honor to be vindicated (156). Certainly American nationalism continued to develop into the 20th century, but regardless on their disagreement over Southern nationalism in the Civil War both McCardell and Foster see this resulting American nationalism as a product of sectionalism and reunification of the North and the South.
  This idea of seeking the recognition of the North ties in with Dr. Siegel’s lecture on ethnicity and the need of a group to be recognized by outsiders. Though ultimately in the development of an American identity and nationalism southerners and northerners would find themselves united under the same title, Foster highlighted the southern need for recognition from the North. This recognition meant to southerners that the North respected them as a contributing and important section of American society, thus proving that indeed their cause was not lost.