The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates by Edward Pollard

The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates by Edward Pollard (1866). Available Free Here.

The Lost Cause by Edward Pollard is a seminal work in the development of a Southern White historical tradition recalling, celebrating, and interpreting the fallen Confederacy to those who were part of the four-year experiment and to their children and grandchildren. Published just a year after the end of the war, it was one of the first book-length works claiming to encompass the war’s full scope within its covers.

Let me begin this review by noting that the book The Lost Cause has some significant differences from the Lost Cause paradigm seen in later works. Pollard was writing the book in 1865 and 1866. He had not lived through Reconstruction and Jeff Davis was not yet an unassailable martyr. Slavery was not yet irretrievably lost and some Southerners thought that it could be restored in a new form. I will note in this review ways that the book accords with the Lost Cause paradigm and ways it diverges, but I also recognize that Pollard died before anyone ever identified a “Lost Cause” school of history.

Pollard was a journalist, not a historian. He lived through the events he described, but observed few of them. As the editor of the Richmond Examiner he had a front row seat to the politics of the capital, but he is not a primary source of information about the military campaigns that fill most of the book. The Lost Cause lacks both the immediacy of a memoir and the temporal distance of a history. What it offers is a written attempt by a man on the losing side of a bloody revolt to come to terms with why the cause was worth sending young men to die for, and why it was lost.

Like other Lost Cause writers, Pollard depicts pre-war slavery as a benign institution benefiting both Southern whites and the United States as a whole. Unlike later Lost Cause writers, he clearly identifies Northern politics with the campaign to destroy slavery, and the South’s secession with the need to wage war to preserve slavery.

Pollard wrote that the North believed that “slavery [was] the leading cause of the distinctive civilization of the South, its higher sentimentalism, and its superior refinements of scholarship and manners.” The North, he argued, was jealous of the superior civilization of the South and so “revenged itself on the cause, diverted its envy in an attack upon slavery, and defamed the institution as the relic of barbarism and the sum of all villainies.” While Northerners defamed the “institution of slavery, no man can write its history without recognizing contributions and naming prominent results beyond the domain of controversy. It bestowed on the world’s commerce in a half-century a single product whose annual value was two hundred millions of dollars. It founded a system of industry by which labour and capital were identified in interest, and capital therefore [49] protected labour. It exhibited the picture of a land crowned with abundance, where starvation was unknown, where order was preserved by an unpaid police; and where many fertile regions accessible only to the labour of the African were brought into usefulness, and blessed the world with their productions.” Or so Pollard said.

Although Pollard describes slavery as the foundation of Southern society, he questions the appropriateness of the term “slavery” to describe the ownership of humans by Southern whites. Pollard writes that “we may suggest a doubt here whether that odious term ‘slavery,’ which has been so long imposed, by the exaggeration of Northern writers, upon the judgment and sympathies of the world, is properly applied to that system of servitude in the South which was really the mildest in the world; which did not rest on acts of debasement and disenfranchisement, but elevated the African, and was in the interest of human improvement…” The white man, he writes, “protected the negro in life and limb, and in many personal rights, and, by the practice of the system, bestowed upon him a sum of individual indulgences, which made him altogether the most striking type in the world of cheerfulness and contentment.” Those who are opposed to slavery on moral grounds are “persons of disordered conscience,” to Pollard.

Pollard performs some amateur anthropology by tracing the conflict over slavery back to the irreconcilable conflict of Roundheads and Cavaliers in England:

“There could be no congeniality between the Puritan exiles who established themselves upon the cold and rugged and cheerless soil of New England, and the Cavaliers who sought the brighter climate of the South, and drank in their baronial halls in Virginia confusion to roundheads and regicides.”

Whatever cultural capital the Southern colonists brought with them to America, it was slavery which was the backbone of the distinctive society that they formed, in the view of the Southern journalist. Pollard writes that “Slavery established in the South a peculiar and noble type of civilization. It was not without attendant vices; but the virtues which followed in its train were numerous and peculiar, and asserted the general good effect of the institution on the ideas and manners of the South. If habits of command sometimes degenerated into cruelty and insolence; yet, in the greater number of instances, they inculcated notions of chivalry, polished the manners and produced many noble and generous virtues. If the relief of a large class of whites from the demands of physical labour gave occasion in some instances for idle and dissolute lives, yet at the same time it afforded opportunity for extraordinary culture, elevated the standards of scholarship in the South, enlarged and emancipated social intercourse, and established schools of individual refinement. The South had an element in its society — a landed gentry — which the North envied, and for which its substitute was a coarse ostentatious aristocracy that smelt of the trade, and that, however it cleansed itself and aped the elegance of the South, and packed its houses with fine furniture, could never entirely subdue a sneaking sense of its inferiority.”

Pollard also practices psychiatry without a license. He diagnoses the anti-slavery sentiment in the North as arising out of the growing sense of inferiority Northerners felt. Inferiority bred envy, and the envy demanded that the source of inequality, slavery, be attacked. In doing this, the Northerner attacked the codification of nature’s law. According to Pollard, citing Toombs, “subordination is the necessary condition of the black man.” Slavery, in his view, “was but the precise adjustment of this subordination by law.” Modern Lost Cause apologists deny the racism of the Confederacy. The original Lost Causer gloried in it.

Northern hatred of slavery led to a decline in the political power of the South. While the North saw its population swell through immigration, its ending of the slave trade meant that the growth of the labor force of the South could not keep pace. Northern Congressional representation exploded.

The North’s advantage was also furthered by tariff’s which funded improvements that were of greater value to Northern industry than to Southern agriculture. The tariffs, Pollard claims, were a “tribute” paid by the South for the expansion of the North.

Northern hatred of slavery took corporal form in the 1850s in the formation of the Republican Party. According to Pollard, the Republican Party was formed by the actions and money of the British abolitionists. Its members, he wrote, believed that “Slavery is a great moral, social, civil, and political evil, to be got rid of at the earliest practicable period.”

The election of Lincoln in 1860 meant that the conflict would take a new form. Finally, we get to the formation of the Confederacy and the start of the Civil War. A few warnings. Unlike the later Lost Causers, Pollard is a frequent critic of Jefferson Davis. Also, since James Longstreet was not yet identified with betrayal, Pollard gives Lee’s lieutenant a more balanced evaluation that we see elsewhere. He also gives a surprising amount of space to discussions of the war in Missouri and Grant’s campaigns in the West. He can occasionally provide incisive criticisms of the Confederate state and people.

One way Pollard distances himself from later Lost Causers if that he does not believe that the Cause was Lost from the very beginning. While the modern Lost Cause paradigm holds that the Confederacy was destined to fail because of the superiority of the North in men and industry over the South. He correctly points out the many advantages the Confederacy had on its side and says that those resources were never properly employed by the Confederate government.

The Confederacy did not lose the war because of a disparity of forces, it lost because of poor leadership and a failure of will in Pollard’s reckoning. Its greatest flaw was in the selection of a president. Jefferson Davis appeared intelligent and experienced, but the reality behind the mask was different. Pollard writes:

His dignity was the mask of a peculiar obstinacy, which, stimulated by an intellectual conceit, spurned the counsels of equal minds, and rejected the advice of the intelligent, while it was curiously not inconsistent with a complete subserviency to the smallest and most unworthy of favourites. His scholarship smelt of the closet. He had no practical judgment; his intercourse with men was too distant and constrained for studies of human nature; and his estimate of the value of particular men was grotesque and absurd.

The South, with Davis at the helm, proceeded into the war with illusions that would be painfully dispelled. Southerners believed that their allies among the Northern Democrats would stand firmly with their Southern allies after the bombs began to burst over Sumter. The second was that a few defeats would demoralize the North and lead Lincoln to sue for peace. The third was that Europe was so dependent on cotton that it could never allow the South to be defeated.

Pollard writes that the Confederacy was possessed by the idea “that the victory of the South was to be insured and expedited by the recognition of the new Government by the European Powers. “Cotton,” said the Charleston Mercury, “would bring England to her knees.” The idea was ludicrous enough that England and France would instinctively or readily fling themselves into a convulsion, which their great politicians saw was the most tremendous one of modern times. But the puerile argument, which even President Davis did not hesitate to adopt, about the power of “King cotton,” amounted to this absurdity: that the great and illustrious power of England would submit to the ineffable humiliation of acknowledging its dependency on the infant Confederacy of the South, and the subserviency of its empire, its political interests and its pride, to a single article of trade that was grown in America!”

In the effort by Davis to leverage cotton as a weapon of state, he damaged the war effort. By cutting off the flow of cotton at the start of the war, Davis failed to generate the revenues necessary to continue the arming of the South prior to the blockade being enforced. He also alienated the Europeans by appearing to be blackmailing them.

The delusions of the Confederates were fed by early victories. Manassas, for example, was treated by the Southerners as one of the decisive victories of world history, even though it was a relatively small affair. Southern whites saw it as proof of the superiority of their kind over the Yankees. Instead of following up the victory with redoubled efforts, Pollard claims, the Confederates rested on their cheaply won laurels. The Northerners with their “active and elastic spirit” responded to defeats by rebuilding their forces with “infuriate energy.” The wonder of Manassas was not the Confederate battlefield victory. Pollard says that “[t]here is no more remarkable phenomenon in the whole history of the war than the display of fully awakened Northern energy in it, alike wonderful in the ingenuity of its expedients and in the concentrated force of its action.” Ultimately it was this spirit of the North that led to victory.

Southern morale, on the other hand, suffered with each defeat. Pollard reminds us that early in 1862, the defeats began piling up. These were not caused by “Providence” as Confederate leaders sometimes said. The were caused, Pollard charged, by “mismanagement” by Confederate officials and officers. The Union would administer battlefield rebukes “to the vaingloriousness of the South [which] were neither few nor light. The Confederates had been worsted in almost every engagement that had occurred since the fall of 1861. There had come disaster after disaster, culminating in the fall of Donelson, the occupation of Nashville, the breaking of our centre, the falling back on all sides, the realization of invasion, the imminence of perils which no one dared to name.” These loses would never be recovered.

Of course, the greatest loss for the South was the loss of her slaves. Although the Republicans had assured the world that the object of the war was reunion not emancipation, in fact the fanatics of the Republican Party, Pollard alleges, had always had their eyes set on ending slavery. Lincoln may have said that the Emancipation Proclamation was anchored in military necessity, but it was the really the permanent triumph of political fanaticism.

The Emancipation Proclamation initially hurt the Northern war effort. It mobilized sectors of Southern society that had sat out the conflict in the expectation that the Union could be restored with slavery intact. It also united the Democratic opposition to the Lincoln administration. Its long-term effects, however, would contribute to the revolutionizing of Southern society.

In his discussion of the military aspects of the war, Edward Pollard gives an account that reasonably reflects the views he formed as a newspaper editor from his perch in Richmond. His writing is neither of the romantically heroic variety nor that of the dispassionate historian. It is journalistic. While he does promote some heroes, like Joe Johnston, he also assigns blame for defeats to Confederate generals, politicians, and in two cases, to the Confederate soldiery.

Pollard gives a decent amount of space to fighting away from the Virginia Theater of War. Charleston, the Sea Islands, and Missouri all get an adequate treatment. There is a fair amount of coverage of operations in Tennessee, Georgia, and Sherman’s operations in the Carolinas. I would not read this book, however, as a guide to the battles or the campaigns. Pollard just did not have the time or resources to construct full narratives of those.

The book is useful, however, in seeing how the Confederate pantheon was being constructed. The four best Confederate generals were Johnston, Forrest, Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. All four are both brilliant and men of great character, in Pollard’s telling of the story. The Confederate soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia is also a collective genius. The Army of Tennessee, on the other hand, was a mess, largely because of Jeff Davis and his meddling, which both encouraged dissention and maintained incompetent officers in command. The one exception in the Army of Tennessee, according to Pollard, was Pat Cleburne whom he refers to as “The Stonewall of the West.” Apparently that sobriquet was well known enough that even a Richmonder knew it.

There is also a pantheon of villains. Davis as a war president comes in for ceaseless attack. You will rarely see his name in this book without it being followed by some biting criticism. Davis was practically a Union intelligence agent, Pollard charges, for example. He was constantly giving away Confederate strategy in his speeches. Pollard writes that all the Union intelligence department needed to do was read the newspaper reports of Davis’s pronouncements to know what the Southern armies were about to do next.

Davis also comes in for criticism for his conceit that he was the most knowledgeable military man in the Confederacy. This unwarranted self-aggrandizement cut him off from proper consideration of the opinions of others. I was wondering if one of those shut out was Pollard.

There are some missteps in the book in terms of coverage. The deaths of Turner Ashby and J.E.B. Stuart may have been blows to the Confederate cavalry, but appending long descriptions of their funerary rites was unnecessary. There is also very little mention of the role of black troops in the Union war effort except to say that a black regiment was present at Fort Wagner and several were at Olustee. He does discuss black troops at Fort Pillow, but only to assure the reader that no massacre took place. The blacks were apparently playing dead.

Pollard incredibly makes the unsupported claim that by early 1864 everyone but, apparently, Jeff Davis knew that slavery was dead and knew that blacks should have been emancipated and enlisted in the army. The record shows that this was not true. Pollard, by the way, makes no mention of the “Black Confederates” whom some modern internet scribes claim filled the ranks of the CSA armies from their earliest days. One would think he would point to their record of service in support of his black enlistment program.

As the war dragged into 1864, both the morale and the morals of the Confederacy deteriorated. Speculation ruled and ruined the money supply. Soldiers seemed to be constantly on leave (or absent without it). Pollard said that many days nearly half of the men enrolled in the army were not in the ranks.

Food shortages afflicted many areas in the South and, as slaves began to escape their enslavers many “families who had been reared in affluence and luxury, were in need of the common necessaries of life. Young, delicate ladies often had to perform menial offices, such as cooking and washing for their families, having lost their servants by the war…” Slaves who ran off condemned white women to the work formerly reserved to African Americans.

The Confederate government resorted to small measures to stave-off defeat, like drives to collect women’s jewelry and silver plate. Pollard writes of the inadequacy of the Confederates’ response to what had become a mortal crisis; “They illustrate the general character of make-shifts in the war. He who seeks to solve the problem of the downfall of the Southern Confederacy, must take largely into consideration the absence of any intelligent and steady system in the conduct of public affairs; the little circles that bounded the Richmond Administration; the deplorable want of the commercial or business faculty in the Southern mind.”

Pollard does anticipate the later Lost Cause paradigm in his assessment of the final set of Union commanders. Sherman is charged with burning virtually every building along the route of his March to the Sea. Grant is a lucky nobody. Sheridan and Thomas have no qualities to commend them. The only genius among the Union high command is, wait for it, Don Carlos Buell!

Edward Pollard’s description of Grant taking command of the Army of the Potomac shows the soon to be crystalized Southern white depiction of the conqueror of the Confederacy: “The new Federal commander in Virginia was one of the most remarkable accidents of the war. That a man without any marked ability, certainly without genius, without fortune, without influence, should attain the position of leader of all the Federal armies, and stand the most conspicuous person on that side of the war, is a phenomenon which would be inexplicable among any other people than the sensational and coarse mobs of admiration in the North. Gen. Grant’s name was coupled with success; and this circumstance alone, without regard to merit of personal agency, without reference to any display of mental quality in the event, was sufficient to fix him in the admiration of the Northern public.”

Pollard exaggerated the disparity in forces between Grant’s and Lee’s armies, claiming for Grant a four-to-one advantage, in order to diminish Grant. Pollard said that in spite of Grant’s small talents, “the North was prepared to worship him, without distinguishing between accident and achievement, and to entitle him the hero of the war.” The fact that Grant, and not Lee, was the ascendant American type was a signal to Pollard of the evils that awaited the American people.

Pollard insists that the general who ultimately achieved the ultimate victory had no mastery of the military arts and sciences. Grant “had no conception of battle beyond the momentum of numbers. Such was the man who marshalled all the material resources of the North to conquer the little army and overcome the consummate skill of Gen. Lee. He, who was declared the military genius of the North, had such a low idea of the contest, such little appreciation of the higher aims and intellectual exercises of war that he proposed to decide it by a mere competition in the sacrifice of human life.”

As the war ground the Confederacy to dust, and the Northern Democrats were cleared out of office by the voters in 1864, the Republicans revealed what had been their real war aim all along. Pollard writes that the purpose of the war…and of the organization which they proposed of the Union, was the abolition of slavery, and the securing of equal rights before the law to the African race.” The Republicans were finally free to advocate for their amalgamationist. They could at last urge the most radical expression of their doctrine of equlaity, which says Pollard, is “if a white man pleases to marry a black woman, the mere fact that she is black gives no one a right to prevent or set aside such a marriage.” I hope you have not fainted. If we can’t prevent a white man from marrying a black woman, how can we stop him from marrying a black man?

Pollard says that the Radical paper The New York Independent “is fond of a theory, that the German, Irish, negro, and other races have come to America, not for the purpose, each, of propagating its distinct species, “but each to join itself to each, till all together shall be built up into the monumental nation of the earth;” “the negro of the South growing paler with every generation, till at last he completely hides his face under the snow.” Enamoured with the character of Toussaint L’Ouverture, it says to those who cherish the prejudice of colour and caste, that “they must cease to call unclean those whom God has cleansed, that they must acknowledge genius whatever be the colour of the skin that enwraps it; and that they must prepare themselves to welcome to the leadership of our armies and our senate, as Southern substitutes for Jeff Davis and his drunken Comus-like crew, that have so long bewitched and despoiled us, black Toussaints, who, by their superiour talents and principles, shall receive the grateful homage of an appreciative and admiring nation.””

Conclusion

As you have read this now-3,500 word long review, I want to thank you for your patience. It was a long row to hoe to get to my recommendation of this 154 year-old book.

In Pollard’s work is not to be found the fully synthesized Lost Cause analysis. Elements of it are here, but it was not born whole in this one book. Pollard’s book is not the Venus on the Half Shell of Confederate historiography. Don’t read it because you think that everything from Dunning and Birth of Nation to Gone With the Wind and Stone Mountain can be found in embryo here. But this does not mean that this is not a book that some of you might want to read.

The book should set to rest any questions about what the Confederacy was fighting for. It was slavery according to Pollard and the white South’s entire civilization was founded on that social, political, and economic form of control of black bodies. It also resolves the chimeral question of whether there were any Black Confederates. If there were, this important newspaperman in Richmond knew nothing about them even though he favored black enlistments.

The book is decently written, but eccentrically organized. It moves from Confederate economics to society, to the battlefield in a clunky and at times confusing manner. The book also suffers from the lack of personal observations by an author who no doubt saw much and heard more. There is too much of the third person in a account written before the last body was buried.

The book does provide an interesting perspective of the war from a loyal Confederate, who yet remained critical of the leadership of the “nation” he loved. Pollard lacks objectivity and distance, but who can blame him for being lost in the passions and bigotries of his day.

I would not recommend this volume as anyone’s first Civil War book or even as a person’s twenty-fifth. Even among the Confederate memoirs there are better introductions to the conflict. However, for the knowledgeable student of the Civil War, this is a volume that should at some point be wrestled with. It gives a sense of the loyal opposition’s perspective on the failures of the Confederate leadership. It also provides an insight into the mind of an intelligent Southern racist.

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