Book Review: Oracle of Lost Causes: John Newman Edwards and His Never-Ending Civil War
Oracle of Lost Causes: John Newman Edwards and His Never-Ending Civil War. By Matthew Christopher Hulbert. Lincoln: Bison Books, 2023. Hardcover, 360 pp. $34.95.
Reviewed by James A. Sandy
One of John Newman Edwards’ closest friends described him upon his death as a “stranger wherever he goes . . . and one of the oddest and best of men.” (258) An apt description of a curious character in America’s 19th Century drama. Whether it is his service as General Joseph Shelby’s right-hand man in the Trans-Mississippi, his powerful written legacy uplifting the heroes of the Confederacy and the “Outlaw West,” or his lesser-known long campaign to protect, extend, and preserve the Old South, Edwards and his life are one students of American history should be much better versed with.
In Oracle of Lost Causes: John Newman Edwards and His Never-Ending Civil War, Matthew Hulbert offers the first comprehensive examination of the critically under-studied frontiersmen, writer, and “. . . .quintessential southern of his day.” (xxxiv) This entertaining chronicle of the eccentric Edwards and his over-the-top life reads like a novel while offering the historiographical consequence of a cutting-edge monograph.
By focusing on the era-spanning life of Edwards, his knack for being in historically shifting moments, and his outlandish written legacy, Hulbert contributes to a leading edge of the field that is placing the American Civil War into a more global context. He paints Edwards and his life as a conduit to understand the “. . . collage of 19th Century America. . . ” and the “. . . American Experience . . .” in summation. (267) Hulbert argues convincingly that we should view the war as but one struggle among many “uprisings and revolutions that shook the western world in the nineteenth century” and Edwards’ life offers a concise vehicle for the viewpoint. (xxix)
Edwards was born of the Old South but only benefitted from its luxuries in his idealization of its society as a link to the Old World order of strict class and social hierarchy, gallant gentlemen, and a bedrock of absolute power. In his Civil War service, writing, and post-war odyssey, Hulbert argues that Edwards became the premier exporter and supporter of the Confederate vision. Perhaps no section typifies Hulbert’s contributions better than chapter 4, which describes Edwards post-Civil War adventure to Mexico and the imperial court of Emperor Maximilian and his Empress Charlotte. Their brief settlement experiment in Cordoba in 1865 and his writings there should serve as important tent-pole in the chronology of the Civil War, the birth of Lost Cause mythology, and American memorialization. (120-122) Edwards’ life connects idealized visions of the antebellum South with the battle for the American frontier and international ventures to save the Confederacy in the post-war decades.
One of Hulbert’s most laudable accomplishments here is accessibility. Fantastically well-written, this work offers the reader a raucous adventure across 19th century America and its most transformative era while making a serious contribution to the scholarship. One might walk away from this read with a confusing affection for Edwards and his saga despite his historical role. As both the field of Civil War studies and historical monographs in general are shifting to grab wider audiences, Hulbert provides a fine example to scholars of how to produce entertaining and productive scholarship.
Dr. James A. Sandy received his PhD from Texas Tech University in 2016 and currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the University of Texas-Arlington History Department where he teaches courses in military and cultural history and serves as director for the History Department’s Undergraduate Internship Program.
I’ve no doubt that Edwards wrote idealised notions of both Southern and American society and culture but I have to address something.
The Lost Cause is not a ‘myth’; it is a historiography (school of historical studies), and a theses.
There is a variable measure of validity to a fair number of its tenets; there are also particular flaws and inset limits to what and how much history it can put at least a satisfactory explanation to.
And even wherein it greatly lacks merit or can be said to be plainly incorrect or inaccurate, even these can tell you something useful.
It is highly similar to the ‘Chez Nous’ school of Quebecois Separatiste historiography of Rene Levesque; the ‘Irregular’ Anti-Treaty theses/school of Irish history of Ernie O’Malley or Gerry Adams or a Settler Colonialism school’s argued Colonised/Indigenous People’s’ history of Patrick Wolfe and/or Leigh Boucher.
Gary Gallagher, Alan T. Nolan, Brooks D. Simpson, etc, are all correct to hold the Lost Cause up for critical reflection; they’re all in error to pose it as a ‘myth’.