Oracle of Lost Causes

“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