Oracle of Lost Causes: John Newman Edwards and His Never-Ending Civil War

by Matthew Christopher Hulbert

Overview

John Newman Edwards was a soldier, a father, a husband, and a noted author. He was also a virulent alcoholic, a duelist, a culture warrior, and a man perpetually at war with the modernizing world around him. From the sectional crisis of his boyhood and the battlefields of the western borderlands to the final days of the Second Mexican Empire and then back to a United States profoundly changed by the Civil War, Oracle of Lost Causes chronicles Edwards’s lifelong quest to preserve a mythical version of the Old World—replete with aristocrats, knights, damsels, and slaves—in North America.

This odyssey through nineteenth-century American politics and culture involved the likes of guerrilla chieftains William Clarke Quantrill and “Bloody Bill” Anderson, notorious outlaws Frank and Jesse James, Confederate general Joseph Orville Shelby, and even Emperor Maximilian I and Empress Charlotte of Mexico. It is the story of a man who experienced Confederate defeat not once but twice, and how he sought to shape and weaponize the memory of those grievous losses. Historian Matthew Hulbert ultimately reveals how the Civil War determined not only the future of the vast West but also the extent to which the conflict was part of a broader, international sequence of sociopolitical uprisings.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496211873
Publisher:	UNP - Bison Books
Publication date:	09/01/2023
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Matthew Christopher Hulbert is an Elliott Associate Professor of History at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. He is the author of The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers became Gunslingers in the American West, winner of the 2017 Wiley-Silver Book Prize and coeditor of Writing History with Lightning: Cinematic Representations of Nineteenth-Century America.
 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface: Coming of Age in an Age of Crisis

Introduction: A Man at War with the World

1: Into the Forge

2: A Brigade of Iron

3: The Costs of Valor

4: In Quest of Camelot

5: War by Other Means

6: Architect

7: The Ghost and the Monster

Epilogue: Fallen Prince

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Editorial Reviews

07/10/2023

In this detailed yet disjointed account, historian Hulbert (Martial Culture, Silver Screen) profiles John Newman Edwards (1839–1889), a Missouri Confederate and editorial writer who rose to “B-list celebrity” as he navigated the Midwestern frontier of the Civil War. In his prewar columns of the late 1850s, Edwards railed against abolitionists and Republicans, unleashing reams of sectional grievances. But like many of his contemporaries, he did not foresee the conflict erupting into all-out war. When it did, he rode eagerly into battles in Missouri and Arkansas, less as a fighter than as a reporter seeking to boost the exploits of his comrades in arms. Returning to Missouri after the war’s end, he took up his pen to celebrate “Confederate superheroes” like bank-robbing outlaws Jesse and Frank James, portraying them as victims of Radical Republican overreach. According to Hulbert, Edwards had a long-lasting impact on the historiography of the war; by threading Missouri themes through his works, he created a distinctive Midwestern version of the “lost cause” focused on guerrilla warfare and postbellum resistance. Though the material sometimes feels like it needs a stronger guiding hand, Hulbert uncovers distinctive details and lesser-known perspectives on the Civil War. Midwestern history buffs, take note. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

The life of John Newman Edwards defies belief. Florid, romantic, and intoxicated by barbarity, he championed the Old South in the quintessential border state, helping former Confederates gain power before he drank himself to death. In Matthew Hulbert’s capable hands, Edwards’s extraordinary story brings into focus the conflicts that made modern America, in a region that defies definition.”—T.J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Custer’s Trials and The First Tycoon


“In John Newman Edwards, Missouri’s notorious Civil War guerrillas found their Boswell. The former cavalryman, romantic reactionary, and wire-pulling editor Confederatized them, most notably the outlaws Jesse James and William Quantrill, into ironic avatars for the Southern Lost Cause in the postwar West. In this sparkling and overdue biography, Matthew Hulbert has at last offered the Bushwhackers’ Boswell, and for us, his own.”—Christopher Phillips, author of The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border


“Oracle of Lost Causes is a gripping, fast-paced story of John Newman Edwards’s journey from a childhood filled with books in Virginia to an adulthood that veered from Missouri to Mexico and positioned him as an architect of the Lost Cause in the West. But it is much more than a biography. In Matthew Hulbert’s skilled hands, readers go deep into the mind of a hardened believer in the supremacy of white people and witness the birth of some of the nation’s most stubborn and distorted narratives of its past. By showing us what Edwards saw in the Civil War era and how he wrote about it, Hulbert offers a fascinating and powerful account of how mythmaking has been woven into the writing of history—and, therefore, how it can be unwoven. Oracle of Lost Causes is essential reading for our times.”—Amy Murrell Taylor, author of Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps, winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize

From the Publisher