This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
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This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
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Add this copy of The Lost Cause to cart. $107.27, new condition, Sold by Booksplease rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Southport, MERSEYSIDE, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2010 by Kessinger Publishing.
by E.A. Pollard
Editor of the Richmond Examiner during the War.
A facsimile of the long out-of-print 1866 edition with twenty-four portraits of Confederate Leaders.
In 1866 the first nickel was minted, Alice in Wonderland was written, the ASPCA and the AWCA were founded, the first baseball bunt was laid down in Brooklyn and, on April 2, Insurrection in Virginia was declared officially over. This was also the year in which the South got its own, long-awaited version of the War Between the States, The Lost Cause, the work of the man universally acknowledged as the most able and most prolific Southern writer of the period.
Edward Alfred Pollard was the highly respected editor of the Daily Richmond Examiner from 1861 to 1867, and the author of many other Confederate-based accounts of the Civil War.
"It is impossible to write history as an intelligible whole, and to secure its ends, without preserving a certain dramatic unity i the narrative," Pollard writes in his introduction. In the succeeding chapters he develops a narrative as fluid and dramatic as a first-class novel. This is General Lee's army on its last legs:
"Jaded horses and mules refused to pull; demoralized and badly scared drivers, with straining eyes and perspiring bodies plied their whips vigorously to no effect; difficult place in the road were choked with blazing wagons, fired to save their contents from the enemy... Hundreds of men dropped from exhaustion; thousands threw away their arms; the demoralization appeared at last to involve the officers; they did nothing to prevent the straggling; and many of them seemed to shut their eyes on the hourly reduction of their commands, and rode in advance of their brigades in dogged indifference.
"But in the jade, famished crowd there was yet left something of the old spirit which had made the Army of Northern Virginia famous throughout the world, and inscribed its banners with the most glorious names of the war."
The Lost Cause is a fascinating, brilliantly written book, long overdue on the shelves of modern readers of the North as well as the South.