Those who followed their leaders into the catastrophe required similar rationalization. Clement A. Evans, a Georgia veteran who at one time commanded the United Confederate Veterans organization, said this: "If we cannot justify the South in the act of Secession, we will go down in History solely as a brave, impulsive but rash people who attempted in an illegal manner to overthrow the Union of our Country." Nolan further states his opinion of the racial basis of Lost Cause mythology: The Lost Cause version of the war is a caricature, possible, among other reasons, because of the false treatment of slavery and the black people. This false treatment struck at the core of the truth of the war, unhinging cause and effect, depriving the United States of any high purpose, and removing African Americans from their true role as the issue of the war and participants in the war, and characterizing them as historically irrelevant. Historian David Goldfield observes: If history has defined the South, it has also trapped white southerners into sometimes defending the indefensible, holding onto views generally discredited in the rest of the civilized world and holding on the fiercer because of that. The extreme sensitivity of some Southerners toward criticism of their past (or present) reflects not only their deep attachment to their perception of history but also to their misgivings, a feeling that maybe they've fouled up somewhere and maybe the critics have something. When asked about purported "neo-Confederate revisionism" and the people behind it, Arizona State University professor and Civil War historian Brooks D. Simpson said: This is an active attempt to reshape historical memory, an effort by white Southerners to find historical justifications for present-day actions. The neo-Confederate movement's ideologues have grasped that if they control how people remember the past, they'll control how people approach the present and the future. Ultimately, this is a very conscious war for memory and heritage. It's a quest for legitimacy, the eternal quest for justification. Tenets of neo-Confederate beliefs Historical revisionism Neo-Confederates often hold iconoclastic views about the American Civil War and the Confederate States of America. Neo-Confederates are openly critical of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln to varying degrees and they are also critical of the history of Reconstruction. Various authors have written critiques of Lincoln and the Union. Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea is singled out for purported atrocities which