Edward Alfred Pollard (February 27, 1832 – December 17, 1872) was an American author, journalist, and Confederate sympathizer during the American Civil War who wrote several books on the causes and events of the war, notably The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates(1866) and The Lost Cause Regained(1868),[1] wherein Pollard originated the long-standing pseudo-historical ideology of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.
Written after the war, these works advocated white supremacy, supported the relegation of blacks to second-class status, and accused the U.S. government of alleged excesses committed both during and after the war.[2] The books gave two different descriptions of the causes of the war and the nature of Southern society: The Lost Cause claimed the main reason for the war was the two opposing ways (largely slavery) of organizing society, and viewed slavery as key to the nobility of the South, while The Lost Cause Regained argued that the primary reason for secession was not slavery, but the preservation of state sovereignty.[3] The latter viewpoint reflects much of Pollard's post-1867 attempts to reconcile former pro-Confederacy ideas with new realities, patriotism, and free-labor unionism.
Early life and education
Edward Alfred Pollard was born on February 27, 1832, on the Oak Ridge Plantation in Nelson County, Virginia,[4] which his grandfather Robert Rives, had built and made his primary residence until his death when Edward was a boy. Pollard's mother, Paulina Cabell Rives Pollard, descended from the region's powerful (and enslaving) Cabell family, one of the First Families of Virginia and had married Richard Pollard. Edward was the youngest of their children; his eldest brother, James Rives Pollard, would die in 1862. Four of Pollard's maternal uncles served in the Virginia General Assembly, and William Cabell Rives (1793–1868), who inherited Oak Ridge upon his father's death, represented Virginia in both houses of Congress as well as served as a U.S. Ambassador to France.[5]
Pollard did not establish a legal practice but traveled to California, where he worked for a newspaper until 1855. Pollard would later write that his experiences during the aftermath of the California Gold Rush convinced him that free-labor societies were a competitive war of all against all, which he used in his justifications for slavery.[7] From 1857 to 1861, Pollard was clerk for the United States House Committee on the Judiciary.
Pollard wrote several books. In 1859, Pollard advocated reopening the slave trade in Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South.[6][1] Pollard also rejected ideas that slavery improved enslaved people and that slavery should gradually fade away.[7] Unlike his most prominent uncles, William C. and Alexander Rives, Pollard strongly favored secession and continued to write about enslaved society and Union depredations during the American Civil War. After Union forces occupied Richmond in 1865, Pollard was arrested for continuing to publish pro-Confederate and pro-slavery writings, and he decried emancipation as the North's ultimate war crime.
In 1866, Pollard published his most famous work, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. This book portrayed the war as a contest between "two nations of opposite civilizations" that had been different since colonial times. Unlike the Puritan North, the Cavalier South had developed a "feudal" society based on slave labor, which "established in the South a peculiar and noble type of civilization." Pollard argued that slavery "inculcated notions of chivalry," "polished the manners" of enslavers, and relieved the "demands of physical labor", thus affording the "opportunity for extraordinary culture". Pollard also worried that the wartime defeat might cause the South to "lose its moral and intellectual distinctiveness as a people, and cease to assert its well-known superiority in civilization."[8] Pollard also wrote that "the South wants and insists upon perpetrating" a "war of ideas".[1]
In 1867, Pollard wrote that the rebellion would reopen and be successful,[9] but the realities of Congressional Reconstruction forced him to reconsider. Also, Republican political gains in late 1867 and the makeup of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1868 after many ex-Confederates either could not vote or boycotted led Pollard to believe that southern Democrats should not stand aside from politics in the upcoming 1868 election. Pollard began to think of the Civil War as a constitutional contest rather than an ideological contest of opposing social systems. Pollard began to support President Andrew Johnson as a defender of constitutional liberty. In similar tones, Pollard began speaking of pre-war states-rights advocates such as John C. Calhoun as Unionists who merely sought their constitutional rights, not secession.[10]
In 1868, Pollard advocated white supremacy (calling it both the "true cause of the war" and the "true hope of the South")[1] during Reconstruction in The Lost Cause Regained, which was written as a Democratic campaign document.[11] Pollard wrote that Johnson's programs were right and that secession was not legal.[12] In this book, Pollard no longer supported Jefferson Davis, instead attacking him for being ineffective and ignorant,[13] and a year later he wrote a scathing biography of Davis entitled The Life of Jefferson Davis. Pollard also criticized many other Confederate political and military leaders in that book. Pollard wrote that the Southern way of life had contributed largely to the defeat. Biographer Jack Maddex Jr. believes that Pollard found it hard to navigate inconsistencies between his new-found pro-Union white supremacist position and a pro-Confederate position he also attempted to hold; after Pollard published his biography of Davis, the Confederacy ceased as a central topic in his writings.[14]
Pollard's opinions continued to change. By the early 1870s, Pollard wrote favoring northern capitalism and thrift, limited civil rights legislation, and black suffrage. Pollard supported segregation but opposed the Ku Klux Klan, and shortly before his death, wrote that by 1860, slavery had "completed its historic mission and its continuance would have been an inexcusable oppression."[15]
Death
Pollard died on December 17, 1872, in Lynchburg, Virginia, at 40. Pollard was buried in the Rives family cemetery on the Oakridge Plantation, notwithstanding its postwar sale to wealthy investor Oliver Beirne, who let it be used as a residence for his daughter and her husband, the former fire-eater U.S. and Confederate Congressman William Porcher Miles.[4][16] General Robert E. Lee having urged Southerners to move on after the wartime defeat, but having died in 1870, the Lost Cause movement would then be fostered by "unrepentant Confederate" Gen. Jubal Early (who had moved to Lynchburg), and by well-connected Lynchburg lawyer and future U.S. Senator John Warwick Daniel, as well as by former Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
Maddex, Jack P. (1974). The Reconstruction of Edward A. Pollard: A Rebel's Conversion to Postbellum Unionism. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN978-0-8078-5054-1. OCLC1330614464.
