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

*Includes a Table of Contents

*Illustrated



Edward Pollard (1832 – 1872), was a native of Virginia and a journalist and author during the Civil War era. But it’s not his work as an ardent secessionist supporter of the Confederacy for the Richmond Examiner during the Civil War for which he is remembered.  In 1867, Pollard published The Lost Cause, championing his voluminous book as a “New Southern history” of the war.  Pollard’s work poignantly reflected the sentiments of unrepentant rebels clinging to their ideology.  Pollard explicitly explained the motivation behind what he termed the “Lost Cause.”  Although the South had lost the Civil War, he argued that the South could still wage and win the “war of ideas.”  


Conceding that the South’s loss meant “restoration of the union and the excision of slavery,” Pollard was still defiant, writing that “the war did not decide Negro equality.”  These Southerners vowed to defy the North, the Republicans and Reconstruction, and “Lost Cause” sentiments began to quickly spread across Southern white society. With his novel, Pollard coined the term “Lost Cause”, which signified a movement that attempted to romanticize the Confederacy and rationalize the reasons for secession and the Civil War. It is still one of the most widespread and influential interpretations of the Civil War.


This edition of Pollard’s important work is specially formatted with over a dozen pictures of the Civil War’s famous leaders and generals, and it also includes a table of contents for easier navigation.