Pollard would later write that his experiences during the aftermath of the California Gold Rush convinced him that free-labor societies were a competitive war of all against all, which he used in his justifications for slavery.

In December of that year, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton issued an order assigning the again-captured Pollard to close confinement at Fort Monroe.

[7] Unlike his most prominent uncles, William C. and Alexander Rives, Pollard strongly favored secession and continued to write about enslaved society and Union depredations during the American Civil War.

After Union forces occupied Richmond in 1865, Pollard was arrested for continuing to publish pro-Confederate and pro-slavery writings, and he decried emancipation as the North's ultimate war crime.

Pollard argued that slavery "inculcated notions of chivalry," "polished the manners" of enslavers, and relieved the "demands of physical labor", thus affording the "opportunity for extraordinary culture".

Pollard also worried that the wartime defeat might cause the South to "lose its moral and intellectual distinctiveness as a people, and cease to assert its well-known superiority in civilization.

In similar tones, Pollard began speaking of pre-war states-rights advocates such as John C. Calhoun as Unionists who merely sought their constitutional rights, not secession.

By the early 1870s, Pollard wrote favoring northern capitalism and thrift, limited civil rights legislation, and black suffrage.

Pollard supported segregation but opposed the Ku Klux Klan, and shortly before his death, wrote that by 1860, slavery had "completed its historic mission and its continuance would have been an inexcusable oppression.

Pollard was buried in the Rives family cemetery on the Oakridge Plantation, notwithstanding its postwar sale to wealthy investor Oliver Beirne, who let it be used as a residence for his daughter and her husband, the former fire-eater U.S. and Confederate Congressman William Porcher Miles.