Southern History of the War
Pollard’s Southern History of the War, a 1,255-page tome whose heft alone discourages reading for many students.1
A native Virginian (1842–1872), Pollard was well-born and university-educated, He was also his own man, kicked out of law school at William and Mary for misconduct. He took on journalism and in his antebellum writings became a noted apologist for Southern causes. After the war began, he joined the staff of the Richmond Examiner.2 With editor John Moncure Daniel, he voiced disparaging opinions of President Davis and his administration.3
Based on his newspaper work, Pollard wrote what must be judged the first Confederate history of the conflict, the Southern History of the War (two volumes). He actually composed it serially as the war progressed: The First Year of the War (Richmond, 1862), The Second Year of the War (New York, 1864) and The Third Year of the War (New York, 1865). He stitched together these writings for his Southern History of the War (1865), which his biographer, Jack P. Maddex Jr., deems “the standard contemporary Southern account” of the conflict.4 Douglas Southall Freeman, in The South to Posterity (1939), calls Pollard “the first formal historian of the Confederacy.”5 Nevins, Robertson and Wiley’s Civil War Books (1969) similarly terms Pollard’s work “the first popular history of the war from the Confederate point of view.”6 Gallagher, Hughes and Krick (2006) acknowledge that Pollard’s observations on Jefferson Davis, one of his favorite subjects, are generally regarded as “too acerbic,” but that his volumes “contain a bountiful harvest of revealing opinions and observations about the Confederacy.”7
Pollard went on to write The Lost Cause (1866), Lee
By Stephen Davis
Edward A. Pollard, (1865)
classic is something that everybody wants to have read,” Mark Twain once wrote, “and nobody wants to read.”
Such is the case of Edward Alfred and His Lieutenants (1867) and Life of Jefferson Davis (1869), as well as such articles as “Stonewall Jackson—An Historical Study” for Putnam’s Magazine (1868). He died in 1872, having transformed himself from an ardent Southern apologist into a supporter of Reconstruction, at least the version championed by President Johnson and Northern Democrats in the several years following the war.8
Of Pollard’s writing in Southern History of the War, David J. Eicher has written, “this famous work is a wonderful historical curiosity.”9 Similar assessments beckoned us to take it on.
In his very first paragraph, Pollard shows his secessionist sentiments. The notion that the Federal Union, once created, was intended to be perpetual was a “natal delusion” (volume I, page 17). And how could it not be, he reasoned, when the country’s two main sections were so different? The South enjoyed “a larger happiness, greater ease of life, and a superior tone of character,” while antislavery elements in the North were marked by “hypocrisy” and “secretiveness” (I, 22). Worse, when Northerners seized control of the federal government and the South lost its chance of equal voice in it, the North managed to impose an economic vassalage upon the Southern people through tariffs and taxation. Then came the creation of a Northern political party screeching its opposition to slavery, and nominating in 1860 for president “a man of scanty political record—a Western lawyer, with the characteristics of that profession—acuteness, slang, and a large stock of jokes—and who had the peculiar claims to a vulgar and demagogical popularity,” enhanced by tales of his youthful skills “in splitting rails, or in rowing a flat-boat” (I, 40).
Nonetheless, Lincoln won the election and promptly filled his Cabinet with “the worst enemies of the South” (I, 41). “The radicalism of the Black Republican administration, and its hostility to the institutions of the South,” Pollard declares, “became manifest to every unprejudiced mind” (I, 163). The Southern states’ secession naturally followed. Then, when installed, Lincoln began to display “the ignorant conceits of a low Western politician, and the flimsy jests of a harlequin” (I, 48).
During the Sumter crisis, “the perfidy of Abraham Lincoln and his advisers was openly and shamelessly consummated” (I, 58-59). By sending provisions to Anderson’s garrison, Lincoln knowingly provoked South Carolinians to fire the first shot—”an ingenious artifice” to evade responsibility for starting the war (I, 61). Then came the mobilization on both sides. In the South, “every village bristled with bayonets” as the people exploded with “a burst of genuine joy and enthusiasm,” now that the region’s years of humiliation were finally coming to an end (I, 73).
The gross and vulgar proclivities of Yankeedom were on full display at Manassas, where herds thronged from Washington “with carriage-loads of champagne” to view the expected rout of the Rebels. “The indecencies of this exhibition of morbid curiosity and exultant hate,” Pollard recorded with his usual hyperbole, “are simply unparalleled in the history of civilized nations” (I, 105). Instead, the voyeurs were treated to the sight of a Federal army routed from the field. “For ten miles, the road over which the Grand Army had so lately passed southward, gay with unstained