Major John Newman Edwards (January 4, 1839 – May 4, 1889)[1] was General Joseph O. Shelby's adjutant during the American Civil War, an author, and a pro-Confederate journalist[2] who founded the Kansas City Times.
Between September 22 and November 3, 1863, Edwards helped maintain and keep the brigade intact as it travelled 1,500 miles through Missouri, inflicting over 1,000 casualties on Union forces, and capturing or destroying an estimated $400,000,000 worth of Federal supplies and property in 2000 year prices.
[4]: 209–211 Reassigned with Shelby to the Clarendon, Arkansas area, Edwards' intelligence network located the Union ironclad USS Queen City.
Edwards distinguished himself at the battles of Little Blue River and Westport, and organized the loot captured at many Union held towns, including Potosi, Boonville, Waverly, Stockton, Lexington, and California, Missouri.
A later verse appended to the angry post-war Confederate anthem, "The Unreconstructed Rebel" commemorates the defiance of Shelby and his men: I won't be reconstructed, I'm better now than then.
Organized as a great troop train of 1,000 men, Edwards and the other cavalry made a defiant portrait as they rode south with the Union Army hot on their heels.
Once again Edwards' network and what remained of the Confederate Secret Service managed a remarkable feat in disguising the troop and providing it with supplies in its long march.
Additionally, they had already managed to negotiate the purchase of hundreds of thousands of acres around Veracruz, Mexico, to which the Shelby and other Confederate army exiles would regroup.
Although he and Shelby's troop and others made it to Mexico, where they offered their swords to Maximilian, the United States government threatened invasion.
Additionally, Maximillian was already facing increasing pressure from the Mexican insurrection, which was spearheaded by forces loyal to the legitimate government of Benito Juarez.
Backed by the publishing and rhetorical skills of Edwards and recent Governor of Louisiana Henry Watkins Allen, thousands of other Confederate soldiers also arrived.
The following year, he began the Kansas City Times, a staunch Democratic paper in a military ruled state governed by Republican Party officials.
Edwards used the paper to champion a return to prominence of former Missouri Confederates, denounced black jurors, "scalawags", and "carpetbaggers", and agitated against military occupation.
In 1877, Edwards published Noted Guerrillas, an account of Confederate partisan warfare during Civil War in western Missouri and border Kansas.
Edwards grew concerned by the early-1870s that Missouri, a divided state which ultimately remained in the Union, would be isolated from the mainstream Lost Cause movement.
William Clarke Quantrill, "Bloody Bill" Anderson, and the James brothers, Frank and Jesse, were among the bushwhackers deified as Confederate heroes in place of standard Lost Cause icons like Robert E. Lee, J.E.B.