Edward A. Pollard
Edward Alfred Pollard was an American author active as a journalist in Virginia. Pollard was a Confederate sympathizer during the American Civil War and wrote several books on the causes and events of the conflict.
Pollard is best known for authoring The Lost Cause in 1866, followed up by The Lost Cause Regained in 1868. Both written after the war, the works gave two different descriptions of the causes of the war and the nature of southern society. The earlier work saw the war as being between two opposing ways of organizing society and saw slavery as a key part of the nobility of the South and a key basis of the difference between the societies. The later work argued that the primary reason for secession was not slavery but the preservation of state sovereignty although he was clearly pro-slavery.
The Lost Cause and The Lost Cause Regained advocated white supremacy, supported the relegation of blacks to second-class status, and accused the US government of alleged excesses committed during and after the war. However, The Lost Cause Regained reflected much of Pollard's post-1867 writing in attempting to reconcile former pro-Confederacy ideas with new realities and supported 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, which his grandfather Robert Rives, had built and made his primary residence until his death when Edward was a boy. His mother, Paulina Cabell Rives Pollard, descended from the region's powerful 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 his maternal uncles served in the Virginia General Assembly, and William Cabell Rives, 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.Edward Pollard received a private education suitable for his class, then attended the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, graduating in 1849. Although his uncle Alexander Rives was a prominent local lawyer, Edward studied law formally, first in Williamsburg at the College of William and Mary as well as in Baltimore, where he was admitted to the bar.
Career
Pollard did not establish a legal practice, but rather 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 of slavery. From 1857 to 1861, Pollard was clerk for the United States House Committee on the Judiciary.During the American Civil War, Pollard was one of the principal editors of the Richmond Examiner. The newspaper supported the Confederate States of America, but was hostile to President Jefferson Davis. In 1864, Pollard attempted to sail for England, but the blockade runner on which he traveled was captured, and Pollard was confined in Fort Warren in Boston Harbor from 29 May until August 12, when he was paroled. In December of that year, an order of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton assigned the again-captured Pollard in close confinement at Fort Monroe. However, he was soon again paroled by General B. F. Butler, whom Pollard had met in Washington D.C. before the war. In January, Pollard was sent toward Richmond, Virginia in a planned exchange for Albert D. Richardson, a well-known correspondent of the New York Tribune, but Richardson had escaped before Pollard's arrival.
Pollard wrote several books. In 1859, he advocated reopening the slave trade in Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South. He also rejected ideas that slavery improved the slaves and that slavery should gradually fade away. Unlike his most prominent uncles, William C. and Alexander Rives, Pollard strongly favored secession and during the civil war continued to write about slave society and Union depredations. 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. Unliked 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 slaveholders, 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 superiourity in civilization."
In 1867 Pollard wrote that the rebellion would re-open and be successful, 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 1867–1868 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. He began to think of the Civil War as a constitutional contest rather than an ideological contest of opposing social systems, and 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 sought only their constitutional rights and not secession.
In 1868, Pollard advocated white supremacy during Reconstruction in The Lost Cause Regained, which was written as a Democratic campaign document. He otherwise wrote that Johnson's programs were right, and that secession was not a legal act. In that book, Pollard no longer supported former President Jefferson Davis, instead attacking him for being ineffective and ignorant, and a year later he wrote a scathing biography of Davis entitled The Life of Jefferson Davis. In this book he also criticized many other political and military leaders of the Confederacy. 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 main topic in his writings.
Meanwhile, he also edited a weekly paper in Richmond, Virginia from 1867 to 1869. Moreover, he conducted the Political Pamphlet there during the presidential campaign of 1868.
Pollard's opinions continued to change. By the early 1870s, Pollard wrote in favor of northern capitalism and thrift, limited civil rights legislation, and black suffrage. He 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."