‘Oracle of Lost Causes’ Review: The Making of a Myth
After the Civil War, a prolific Missouri author glorified the Southern cause and made heroes of Confederate generals and guerrilla fighters.
By Gerard Helferich
Sept. 10, 2023 3:02 pm ET
When any war ends, a new battle begins, the so-called memory war waged by political partisans over how the conflict will be remembered. After the Civil War, Confederate apologists claimed that the struggle had been over states’ rights and Northern aggression, not slavery; that slaveholding was just and benevolent; and that the South was morally and socially superior to the North. Meant to ease the sting of defeat and defend Southern honor, this mythology, known as the Lost Cause, would serve as a pretext for the racial terror perpetrated over the next century and more.
In the postbellum decades, a Missouri-based author and newspaperman named John Newman Edwards emerged as an influential advocate of the Lost Cause, rewriting history and promoting a reactionary political agenda. Along the way, he launched the legends of (among others) former rebel leader Gen. Joseph Shelby; the notorious Confederate guerrilla raider William Quantrill; and the bushwhackers-turned-bandits Frank and Jesse James. In “Oracle of Lost Causes,” Matthew Christopher Hulbert argues that it is time for Edwards to step out of his role as star-maker and “command top billing.”
Oracle of Lost Causes: John Newman Edwards and His Never-Ending Civil War
John Newman Edwards was born in 1838, to a Virginia family of ample pedigree but limited means. As a boy, he devoured romantic tales of Greek heroes, Roman emperors and medieval knights, developing a lifelong nostalgia for an idealized past. He also concluded, Mr. Hulbert writes, that “the royals, nobles, and aristocrats of the Old World and the American South’s elite planters and intellectuals shared timeworn traits that affirmed their right to rule.”
When he was 17, Edwards left Virginia to seek his fortune in the political cauldron of western Missouri, arriving as violence erupted between pro-slavery partisans there and Free-Staters in neighboring Kansas. In the town of Lexington, Edwards found work on a pro-slavery newspaper. He also befriended the dashing Joseph Shelby, the transplanted scion of one of Kentucky’s first families and a slaveholder who had already led mounted raids across the Kansas border. To the admiring Edwards, eight years his junior, Shelby was “the epitome . . . of cavalier sophistication,” Mr. Hulbert writes, “the closest thing John had ever seen to one of his Round Table idols in the flesh.” The friendship would endure, to both men’s advantage, for the rest of Edwards’s life.
When Shelby raised a Confederate cavalry company at the beginning of the Civil War, Edwards eagerly enlisted. Promoted to adjutant, he was charged with writing his commander’s official reports, always with an eye to future historians as well as his Confederate superiors. By war’s end, Edwards had been promoted to major. In 1867 he published his first book, “Shelby and His Men.” It was meant, he wrote in the preface, as an “offering” laid “upon the altar of Southern glory and renown.”
Five years later, Edwards released his second book, “Shelby’s Expedition to Mexico.” In the summer of 1865, the ex-general and a few hundred of his men, including Edwards, had marched into Mexico and offered their services to Emperor Maximilian, the Habsburg prince whom the French had installed after deposing reformist president Benito Juárez. To Juárez and his followers, Maximilian was a usurping despot, but to Edwards the emperor represented, as Mr. Hulbert puts it, all that “was good about the Old World: royal bloodlines, imperial power, sophistication, chivalry, rigid hierarchy, and order.”
Politely declining their offer of arms, Maximilian settled the former rebels on some farmland near Córdoba, where the “Confederados” began to build a planter society like the one they had lost north of the border. Then, in 1867, after Napoleon III had withdrawn his support of Maximilian, Juárez returned to power, and the Mexican emperor faced a firing squad. Arriving back in Missouri, Edwards worked on several newspapers in the coming years, promoting the Lost Cause and railing against the scourge of Reconstruction.
He also made folk heroes of Frank and Jesse James. During the Civil War, the James brothers had ridden with William Quantrill, whose guerrilla tactics, Mr. Hulbert reminds us, relied heavily on “assassination, torture, arson, . . . rape, and even massacre.” After the war, the Jameses took to robbing banks. But in Edwards’s accounts, the brothers were latter-day Robin Hoods, fighting for justice and forced into a life of crime by corrupt Republican politicians. Befriending the bandits, he published their letters and editorialized on their behalf, spreading their fame and appealing for public sympathy. After Jesse’s death in 1882, Edwards negotiated Frank’s surrender and helped to direct his (ultimately successful) legal defense.
In “Noted Guerillas” (1877), Edwards glorified Quantrill, “Bloody Bill” Anderson and other bushwhackers. But eventually even he had to admit that the Southern cause was lost irrevocably. Disillusioned, depressed, embittered, Edwards turned increasingly to drink and died of alcoholism in Jefferson City, Mo., on May 4, 1889, at the age of 51.
To Mr. Hulbert, an assistant professor of history at Hampden-Sydney College, Edwards’s life is nothing less than “a grand collage of nineteenth-century America.” The author has researched his story deeply, and he tells it well, including the myriad ways in which Edwards twisted the truth in his reactionary harangues. Even so, one can’t help wishing that, in recounting the life of a fervent, lifelong apologist for the Confederacy, Mr. Hulbert had adopted a more critical tone. (Not to imply that he sympathizes with Edwards’s views.) He might have stepped back more often to remind us of the tremendous harm that such mythmakers inflicted; for Edwards’s memory war rages still, as in the controversies surrounding monuments to slaveholders and Confederate leaders. More than 150 years after Appomattox, we can never forget what is at stake.
Mr. Helferich’s most recent book is the historical novel “Hot Time,” published under the pen name W.H. Flint.
