Reexamining “The Lost Cause” From Pre-Civil War To Trump

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide
News Analysis

Edward Pollard grew up on a Virginia plantation and failed at nearly every turn until he became a white supremacist.

His name may sound unfamiliar, but his story sounds familiar now that the winner of the 2024 presidential election has been announced. Here are the facts about Pollard, who helped launch The Lost Cause, a post-Civil War movement that claimed slavery did not cause the war and slaves were carefree and happy on plantations.

Pollard was raised by slaves after he was born on an Oak Ridge Plantation in 1832 in Nelson County located near Charlottesville, Lynchburg, and Waynesboro. Pollard grew up and relocated to California. There, he failed as a miner and a newspaper reporter. He returned home, joined the Richmond Examiner in 1861 and five years made his mark after he published “The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates.”

Pollard puts a face on white supremacy, in other words, due to the fact that his popular 1866 book, (which was published the year after slavery ended in 1865,) helped to fuel the feverish white supremacy movement called The Lost Cause. Its members not only claimed that slavery did not start the Civil War, they also rewrote (or manipulated) history and erected Confederate monuments on huge pedestals that towered over newly-freed slaves in public squares.

“What we want especially in the South, is that the negro shall be brought down from those false steps which he has been allowed to take in civilization, and reduced to his proper condition as a slave,” Pollard wrote earlier in his 1859 book, “Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South.”

Pollard continued, “I cannot bear to see negro slaves affect superiority over the poor, needy, and unsophisticated whites who form a terribly large proportion of the population of the South. When I see a slave above his condition, or hear him talk insultingly of even the lowest white man in the land, I am strongly tempted to knock him down.”

The point is Pollard failed at nearly every turn until he returned home, became a white supremacist and wrote a book that blamed his bad decisions on Blacks, similar to how the nation’s current president-elect filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy for his companies six times, but finally succeeded when he became an advocate for white supremacy. Like Pollard,  in other words, Trump experienced wild success after he became a white supremacy advocate during former President Barack Obama’s two terms that stretched from  2009-2017.

In an effort to understand white supremacy, many academicians and journalists have toiled and scratched their heads over laptops, including Britney Cooper, who wrote about Trump’s first presidential win in Cosmopolitan on Nov. 9, 2016. “Donald Trump’s victory yesterday is an attempt by disgruntled white Americans to slow down the American social progress ushered in by Barack Obama’s presidency,” Cooper wrote. “This is retaliation toward a country that voted for a Black president and had the audacity to try to leave the racial politics of the last two centuries behind.”

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The Lost Cause, which began a few years before the Civil War, provides answers. The Lost Cause used denials and manipulation to justify white supremacy back in the day, much like many today are explaining Trump’s second term by dismissing or minimizing white supremacy’s enduring impact.

“What many people don’t realize is that white supremacy is a culture that is much broader and deeper,” Politico writer Erin Aubry Kaplan wrote on Nov. 20, 2022.

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