Oracle of Lost Causes by Matthew Christopher Hulbert
John Newman Edwards was a man on the wrong side of history. He came from a prominent but decaying Southern planter family and sought his fortunes out West. He fought with the Confederates, and when the war ended, crossed the border to support Mexico’s Emperor Maximilian against the country’s elected President Benito Juarez. When the empire fell, he made his way northward and became the publicist for Jesse James, the Confederate guerilla-turned-highway robber.
In historian Matthew Christopher Hulbert’s biography, Edwards becomes an exceptional yet characteristic product of the antebellum South. Steeped in Walter Scott romanticism, Edwards was a writer who imbued the Old South with a patina of chivalry and good manners. He went further than most Confederate apologists and appeared to live in an alternate world that demanded heroes; his penchant for the theatrical demanded a stage as large as the American West. His importance was as the author of legends, false narratives of the lost Southern cause and the outlaws of the Old West that became fodder for early Hollywood.
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