Description
Book Synopsis2024 Spur Award Finalist
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 th
Trade Review"The author has researched his story deeply, and he tells it well."—Gerard Helferich,
Wall Street Journal"Hulbert uncovers distinctive details and lesser-known perspectives on the Civil War. Midwestern history buffs, take note."—
Publishers Weekly"
Oracle of Lost Causes is an entertaining and informative read that is pushing the field of Civil War history in new and exciting directions—both in its style and content."—Summer Perritt,
Civil War Monitor“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
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
