Reviewing The Lost Cause (April 2026)

Recently, I came across a reference to Edward A. Pollard’s 1867 American Civil War history, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. It was not a positive reference as it focused on Pollard’s white supremacist views. For months I set it aside . . . indefinitely . . . but after reading Vasily Grossman’s 1944 article ‘The Hell of Treblinka’ and his later novel Everything Flows, I thought it might be worthwhile to read another non-standard history of war,(1) this time about the American Civil War.

Pollard was an editor with the Richmond Examiner during the Civil War, and so he was at the centre of the latest news and information circulating in the Confederacy’s capital. Although a staunch supporter of the Confederacy, he was highly critical of the administration of Confederate President Jefferson Davis for its inept management of the war. For Pollard, Richmond could be charged with losing the war, what with its class-based conscription policy that exempted those who could pay;(2) its incompetent management of foodstuffs and supplies for the military (shoes for the common foot soldier were a luxury); its interference with military planning; its failure to court European recognition of the Confederacy in Europe, especially from England and France; and its locating the capital within easy marching distance from the North. Richmond was attacked multiple times by Union forces during the war, and the area of Northern and Eastern Virginia around Richmond became the principal theatre of the war.(3)

Pollard’s thesis, simply put, is the Confederate cause was a morally just cause. In order to justify this assertion, he is compelled to play up the political tyranny of the North (e.g., the radical abolitionists), greed and the agency of money driving the war effort (though he admits that it was on both sides), the culture(4) and chivalry of the South (the legacy of the English cavaliers), the superiority of democracy in a federal system in which each member State is invested with a degree of sovereignty that limits the totalizing authority of a central government. And most importantly, he has to keep silent about the evils of slavery. So, for example, engaging in a ‘whataboutist’ critique of the North’s accumulation of wealth from the Atlantic slave trade would be a tactical mistake.

Pollard’s invocation of States’ rights was simply a ruse to allow legalized slavery. The Southern slave States rationalized it in the extreme arguing that the U.S. Constitution of the day entitled States to exercise those powers not explicitly granted to the federal government. Since slavery was not banned in the Constitution and the federal government was not delegated the authority to regulate the practice, an opening was provided for slave owners to influence State legislators to enact pro-slavery laws on their behalf. In an age when political rights were race-based and gender-based, the notion of human rights was completely alien. Slavery was not morally abhorrent to the leaders of the Christian South. On the contrary, slavery became the vehicle by with the Southern States competed for power in Washington with the newly-industrializing Northern States. The North no longer relied on labour-intensive farming, and so it didn’t need millions of slaves to plant and harvest the crops. The South, on the other hand, was fully agrarian, and it did require millions of slaves prior to the invention and deployment of mechanized farming.

My reading of the book is mostly but not wholly critical. For example, from the text, it can be inferred that the Civil War was waged over perceived inequities (between North and South) in political and economic power in the Union. However, that does not entail dismissing slavery as an attendant cause of the war. Quite the opposite: it is impossible for the history of the Civil War to ignore the slavery question in all of its aspects, as it was fundamental to the political, economic and eventually military conflict between North and South. After all, it was slavery that created and sustained the aristocratic social structure of the South and enabled the Southern ruling elite to contest the dominance of the Northern elite. Unsurprisingly, Pollard elects to avoid class-based analysis, but the reader can readily surmise from the narrative that the ruling classes of the North and South sucked their workers and slaves into their power struggle, propagandizing, proselytizing and recruiting them. Of this he writes,

The war spirit in either section was fed and stimulated, in a very great degree, by the profits which the heavy public expenditures brought to large classes of persons directly responsible for the war, and connected with its operations.

Nevertheless, Pollard is impressed by the “magnificent array” of Union and Confederate soldiers and their regimental colours facing off across the hills and valleys just prior to battle. And he is fairly obsessed with the details of the battles, exclaiming in admiration at the tactical brilliance of a Confederate general executing a perfect feint or flanking maneuver. Despite his enthusiasm for the strategic side of warmaking, he does not hold back from putting the reality of war on display. The following eye-witness report of the Battle of Fort Donelson early during the war paints a gruesome canvas of what the battlefield looks like by day’s end.

“I could imagine,” says an eye-witness of the field of carnage, “nothing more terrible than the silent indications of agony that marked the features of the pale corpses which lay at every step. Though dead and rigid in every muscle, they still writhed, and seemed to turn to catch the passing breeze for a cooling breath. Staring eyes, gaping mouths, clenched hands, and strangely contracted limbs, seemingly drawn into the smallest compass, as if by a mighty effort to rend asunder some irresistible bond which held them down to the torture of which they died. One sat against a tree, and, with mouth and eyes wide open, looked up into the sky, as if to catch a glance at its fleeting spirit. Another clutched the branch of an overhanging tree, and hung half-suspended, as if in the death-pang he had raised himself partly from the ground; the other had grasped his faithful musket, and the compression of his mouth told of the determination which would have been fatal to a foe, had life ebbed a minute later. A third clung with both hands to a bayonet which was buried in the ground. Great numbers lay in heaps, just as the fire of the artillery mowed them down, mangling their forms into an almost undistinguishable mass.”

But Pollard goes further and targets the North’s methods of waging war as being beyond the pale. He gives several examples which if occurring today would appear to be war crimes, most notably General Philip Sheridan’s campaign of terror through Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and General William T. Sherman’s scorched-earth march through Georgia and then on through South Carolina. When Pollard speaks of the atrocities committed by Northern troops, he is saying nothing new. To his credit, Pollard does acknowledge the Union General George McClellan’s conviction (and an unpopular one at that) that wars ought to be waged with restraint and in keeping with the “laws of civilized and Christian warfare.” And doubtless, there were atrocities committed by soldiers from the South as well, but they would find no place in this book any more than would accounts of the abominations of slavery. What is shocking is that in such a brutal war, both North and South convinced themselves that they occupied the higher moral ground.

And then there is President Lincoln’s (infamous) illegal suspension of the ancient right of habeas corpus, which smacks of the arrogation of presidential powers during wartime, a recurring theme of America’s wars from the post-Civil War Indian wars, through the World Wars, the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan up to and including the most recent wars against Iran and Venezuela. According to Pollard,

At [sic] the North, there was no necessity for arbitrary arrests. The country was not invaded. The war was at a distance; and was offensive, not defensive. Except in portions of the Border States, the public sentiment was unanimous as against the South; opinions only differing as to the best means of reducing the distant “rebellion.” Yet a system of terrour was established, which could only have been warrantable at the South, and was held to be unnecessary even there.

In his conclusion, Pollard shows his hand. First, he acknowledges that on the questions of secession and slavery, the North won; the South lost. Reflecting on the end of slavery in America, he opines,

That war closed on a spectacle of ruin, the greatest of modern times . . . their slave property taken away by a stroke of the pen; a pecuniary loss of two thousand millions of dollars involved in one single measure of spoliation—a penalty embraced in one edict, [the Emancipation Proclamation] in magnitude such as had seldom been exacted unless in wars synonymous with robberies.

This is the businessman’s ledger, the very antithesis of those grand principles of equality endorsed by America’s leaders in the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Pollard refuses to yield to these principles. In his clarion call to the future, he pronounces that “the war did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide State Rights.” And that brings us to the 21^st century where these three issues continue to divide Americans.

_____

Endnotes