Oracle of Lost Causes: John Newman Edwards and His Never-Ending Civil War

Finalist for the 2024 Spur Award 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 the story of a man who experienced Confederate defeat not once but twice, and how he sought to shape and weaponize the memory of those grievous losses. Historian Matthew Christopher Hulbert ultimately reveals how the Civil War determined not only the future of the vast West but also the extent to which the conflict was part of a broader, international sequence of sociopolitical uprisings.

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

About the Author :
Matthew Christopher Hulbert is an Elliott Associate Professor of History at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. He is the author of The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers became Gunslingers in the American West, winner of the 2017 Wiley-Silver Book Prize, and coeditor of Writing History with Lightning: Cinematic Representations of Nineteenth-Century America.  

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 "More than a biography of a 'natural-born troubadour' and 'fiercely loyal friend,' this fascinating book shows the Civil War and post-Civil War West for what it was, and how myths and legends were made."-Johnny D. Boggs, True West "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 "Seasoned readers and readers new to Civil War–era historiography will find much to consider in this biography."-Claire M. Wolnisty, Journal of Arizona History "Hulbert provides a fine example to scholars of how to produce entertaining and productive scholarship."-Emerging Civil War "Hulbert's book is a vital contribution to our current efforts to confront the enduring legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras."-Christopher Grasso, Missouri Historical Review "A thorough and admirable attempt to elevate a fascinating supporting character from the Civil War into a starring role . . . Hulbert's effort meets with great success."-Cecily N. Zander, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society "While the famous figures of the Civil War have garnered untold amounts of attention and while the South's Lost Cause has resulted in a glut of new scholarship in recent years, Matthew Cristopher Hulbert's Oracle of Lost Causes: John Newman Edwards and His Never-Ending Civil War accomplishes a remarkable feat by adding something new to both Civil War biography and the study of Lost Cause memory."-Journal of Southern History “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