WHITE LIAR

Edward Pollard was a newspaperman, a lawyer, a congressional clerk, a prisoner of war, and a bigamist. However, the Virginia native won fame as a defender of slavery, as a propagandist for white supremacy, and as creator of the “Lost Cause” mythology that soothed Southern psyches after the Civil War and suffused Southern politics for a century.

Born in 1832, Pollard grew up watching slaves toil on his family’s two plantations. Upon graduating from the University of Virginia in 1850, he studied law at William and Mary until that college expelled him for misbehavior. He went west to get in on the. “The American institution of slavery does not depress the African,” Pollard wrote. “It elevates him from the condition of a nomad, a heathen, a brute to that of a civilized and comfortable creature and gives to him the precious treasure of a saving religion.”